[Skip the spiel: listen or buy now]

Certainty can make great anthemic pop songs. You can dance to certainty. It is a Good Thing.

Doubt can make music that’s more nuanced and, some might say, more interesting.

You can’t dance to doubt.

But right now I don’t feel like dancing.

Since around 2010 a lot has changed for the worse. All right-thinking folk have been appalled at the way Britain’s unelected Tory/Lib Dem government has made an unfair society unfairer still – undermining households and wrecking lives.

Largely my political anger has informed the stuff I write for The Sweet Nothings. But a second strand of new songs has emerged, and to play these it seemed more fitting to revert to solo mode.

These songs are borne out of the self-doubt I started to feel when the havoc and insecurity caused by the bankers and the toffs began to creep in to my life and my family’s.

I questioned every choice I’ve ever made. And then I questioned whether there ever were choices, or whether my course was plotted all along by societal influences that are way out of my hands.

The Glass Delusion is the sound of this questioning. It’s the sound of doubt. And that’s a fairly different sound from my earlier stuff.

Bleak? No. That would imply the loss of hope, and I don’t think either I or The Glass Delusion have reached that point. (‘Bright Horizon’ is the sound of hope and questioning.)

Downbeat? Yeah, I suppose. It ranges a lot though. ‘They Played My Song on Radio 1’ carries the album’s theme of underachievement and underconfidence – but it shares the knockabout comedy approach of songs I was writing yonks ago, like ‘Share Your Kit’.

(I quite often forget that this is actually my debut album. In my mind it’s about my fourth.)

Will you like it? Yes. It’s bloody great. Just don’t put it on in the garden on a sunny day. Wait until sunset and pour yourself a whisky. And whatever you do, don’t try and dance.

Listen, buy, download

Have I convinced you? Your options are several!

• Listen to the whole album online now before you buy
• Buy a CD copy now, priced at £6 plus postage – this will be shipped after the official release date of 29 July but you’ll receive an immediate digital download as well
• Buy a digital download now, priced at £5 – again, you get this immediately
• Buy a CD from me at the Indietracks festival – 26 to 28 July… see you there!