The Inner Circle

The Inner Circle is the most personal thing I have written. It is about my family and the small, fierce collection of friends who make up my world - the ones who show up, who get the joke before it lands, who are in the car when the plan changes for the better. I am Joseph Laurence, a UK songwriter and composer, and this is the record where I stop writing about imagined worlds and write about my own.

Where my other records build whole new places to step into, this one points the camera the other way - at the kitchen table, the back seat, the group chat that never sleeps, the night that ran on far too long and was perfect for it. Same cinematic instinct, turned on a real life and the people in it.

Each song is a person, a place or a night that meant something. The adventures we go on together run all the way through it - the spontaneous ones, the daft ones, the ones we will still be retelling in thirty years. Some are big and arms-around-each-other; some are just two people and a quiet hour. All of them are true.

It is warm, it is anthemic in places and quiet in others, and it is unashamedly about belonging. There are choruses made to be sung back in a room full of the right people, and there are verses that only really make sense at 2am. A love letter to the few who make everything else worth it.

If you have followed The Runaway Mine Train and Arcadian Sky, this is the warm, beating heart at the centre of the same body of work - less about the worlds out there, more about the people who get you through them.