Keaton Henson is shedding the “quiet boy” persona that has defined much of his career. Embracing the grunge-infused sounds of his youth on new album Parader, the elusive songwriter melds emotional darkness, melancholy, and seething frustration as he reckons with the hauntings of his past: “I was nervous about being too loud, but then it sort of just came out.”What unravels across Parader’s 12 tracks is an introspective autopsy of time as it distorts and folds to inhabit the songwriter’s present. “There are these disjointed snapshots,” he shares, “memories across time popping up amongst this collection of thoughts about what it feels like to be this age and a musician.”What unravels across Parader’s 12 tracks is an introspective autopsy of time as it distorts and folds to inhabit the songwriter’s present. “There are these disjointed snapshots,” he shares, “memories across time popping up amongst this collection of thoughts about what it feels like to be this age and a musician.”“Parader has legitimate confidence, it’s not me pretending to be anything I’m not,” Henson admits. “It’s maybe just me accepting that part of me is this. It’s louder and it has those bigger, louder, rasher sounds, but not from a performative point of view. Maybe I’m accepting that that is a part of me as well.” As the record closes out, final track ‘Performer’ brings us full circle to the question of the album’s title – the two intrinsically linked. As he sings, “I’ll show my scars to you no matter who you are,” Henson acknowledges the emotional pains of being a musician in the public eye, with the relentless march of time a grudging ally in delivering his stories: “I am the parader. The person who parades around showing their wounds for a living.”
