End of the Middle

Released on 14 February 2025, Richard Dawson’s eighth solo album arrives like a whispered confession. Following the futuristic sprawl of The Ruby Cord, this is a return to the domestic and the deeply human — not in scope, but in scale. These are kitchen sink epics: songs set in hallways, bedsits, allotments, and childhood bedrooms, echoing with memories that aren’t always your own.

Written in a shed eventually flattened by a storm (yes, really), End of the Middle is Dawson’s most emotionally direct work to date. Its focus is the family. Specifically, how behaviours ripple across generations, bruising the present with the weight of the past. But Dawson doesn’t moralise. His characters, some familiar from past albums, are fragile, flailing, and deeply felt. The girl in “The Question” meets a headless ghost by the railway. The house in “Bolt” is struck by lightning. The final track, co-written with Sally Pilkington, is a father–daughter duet that glows like a late-night lullaby, delicate and devastating.

Musically, it’s stripped-back but strange. Drummer Andrew Cheetham was asked to sound “pathetic”; clarinettist Faye MacCalman strikes like lightning. Sam Grant’s production offers no shelter, Dawson’s voice, raw and close-miked, lands with unnerving intimacy, like he’s telling these stories directly to you, or perhaps himself.

If Peasant, 2020, and The Ruby Cord mapped society across time, End of the Middle draws that map on the back of an envelope. It’s tender, surreal, and quietly immense. A dispatch from the centre of a storm we all inherit, and maybe, with luck, begin to weather.