Jessie Ware Wrote Her First Key Change on Her Sixth Album

Jessie Ware has made six albums across fourteen years. The lead single from the newest one contains the first key change she has ever written.

Superbloom came out on 17 April through EMI, running forty-two minutes and forty-two seconds. It follows That! Feels Good! from 2023 and continues the disco-inflected run she has been on since 2020.

A Key Change Is a Bigger Deal Than It Sounds

The detail appears on “I Could Get Used to This”, the lead single, released on 23 January. It was produced and co-written by Miranda Cooper and Jon Shave of Xenomania alongside Sophia Brenan, and described as lush disco-R&B, funky and drenched in strings.

A key change is one of pop’s oldest devices and one of its most divisive. Lifting a final chorus by a tone is the most reliable way to make a song feel like it is escalating, and it has been used so often that it now reads as either triumphant or corny with very little space in between.

Avoiding it for five albums is therefore a position, not an oversight. Ware’s records have been built on groove and vocal control rather than on structural fireworks, and a key change is exactly the kind of gesture that style tends to hold in reserve.

Using one on the first song from the sixth album is a signal about the whole record. Ware called the track the “invitation into the world of this album”, listing its themes as “romance, real love, performance, celebration and pleasure (always!) in a garden full of gods and goddesses”.

Bringing in Xenomania for it matters too. Miranda Cooper and her collaborators wrote the most structurally inventive British pop of the 2000s, frequently building songs out of sections that should not fit together — precisely the sensibility a first key change would benefit from.

The Morricone Estate Signed Off

The second single, “Ride”, released on 20 February, opens with a synth interpolation of the theme from The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.

Interpolating a film theme that recognisable is a legal question before it is a musical one, and the answer here was unusually warm: Ennio Morricone’s estate endorsed the use. Ware described it as “a really good seal of approval”.

That endorsement is worth more than a clearance. Estates routinely permit uses they have no enthusiasm for, because permission is a licensing decision; going on record as approving is a different act, and for an artist reaching into one of the most-quoted scores in cinema it removes the charge of opportunism.

“Ride” was the first song written for the album, produced by Ware with Jack Peñate and Karma Kid in 2024. She has called it the most “dancey” thing on the record — “a song for the clubs, for the dancefloor — fun, cinematic, cheeky and powerful”. Our piece on why synths took over film scoring covers the tradition she is borrowing from.

The black-and-white video, directed by Thomas James, casts the actor James Norton as her cowboy love interest in a stylised Western. Ware invited him after running into him at a concert by their mutual friend Jack Peñate, which is a more casual origin than a major-label single video usually has.

An Actor Reading the Introduction

Third single “Automatic”, released on 27 March, opens with a spoken-word introduction by Colman Domingo.

Ware’s account of how it happened is unusually candid about the revision. “I was actually the voice at the beginning at first,” she said, “but I wanted someone sexier and smoother and I knew Colman Domingo was the man for the job! He comes in as this ‘voice of the love gods’.”

Replacing your own vocal with somebody else’s on your own record is a small act of self-editing that most artists would not describe publicly. It is also the kind of decision that only gets made when the person in charge of the record is the artist.

Which, in this case, she is. Continuing the approach she adopted with What’s Your Pleasure? in 2020, Ware remained in creative control as A&R of the album — the role a label normally fills, deciding what the record is, who works on it and when it is finished.

Six producers appear on it: James Ford, Karma Kid, Barney Lister, Stuart Price, Jon Shave and TommyD, with Ben Baptie mixing. Assembling that many rooms without an A&R to coordinate them is only possible if somebody holds a clear picture of the record, and here that somebody is the singer.

The names themselves describe the range being covered. Stuart Price has spent two decades making dance records that work on radio; James Ford comes from guitar bands and synth-pop; TommyD’s background is in British soul and hip hop. Six producers from six starting points is a wide net, and the risk of incoherence is real.

What holds it together is that the person deciding what stays is also the person singing. An A&R assembles a record from the outside and judges it as a product; an artist doing the same job judges it against what she can actually perform, which is a narrower and more useful test.

Digging Deeper Into a Fantasy World

Ware has been explicit about what she wanted this record to do differently. Since What’s Your Pleasure?, she said, she had been experimenting with “this fantasy world and escapism”, describing herself as an artist who is not a “by-the-book ‘pop star'” but who enjoys “dress-up, glamour, and fun”.

Superbloom was meant to “dig deeper”, aiming to “connect with real relationships and appreciate the love I have”. The press material framed it as an “increasingly euphoric body of work” exploring “our shared craving for touch, pleasure, intimacy and connection”.

Those two descriptions pull in opposite directions, which is the interesting part. Escapist disco and songs about your actual relationships are not obviously compatible, and the standard resolution is to abandon one of them.

Keeping both means the glamour has to carry real material, which is a harder brief than either alone. It is also the reason a key change turns up: an escalation device is more useful when the song underneath it has something at stake.

Her route to this position explains why she can attempt it. Ware began as a guest vocalist and then a soul-leaning singer-songwriter, and the disco turn arrived comparatively late — which means the audience for the dance records already knew her as a singer rather than meeting her through a groove.

That is a rarer starting point than it sounds. Most artists working in this register are producers first, with the vocal serving the track; here the track has always served the vocal, and the guest producers are hired into a framework rather than defining one.

Acoustic Shows Before an Arena Tour

The rollout ran in two directions at once. Before release, Ware hosted a run of UK shows called An Evening with Jessie Ware, built around an acoustic set previewing the album interspersed with her answering audience questions.

Playing a disco record acoustically to a small room, and then stopping to take questions, is close to the opposite of how the songs are designed to be heard. It is also a good test: material that survives being stripped to a voice and a guitar has something under the production.

On 15 April, two days before release, she announced the Superbloom Tour — her first arena tour, with dates across North America and Europe from October, and the British singers Dhruv and Naomi Scott opening.

A fourth single, “Sauna”, followed on 17 July with an extended version and a remix by the London DJ collective Horse Meat Disco, keeping the record in circulation through the summer ahead of those dates.

Sixth album, first arena tour, first key change. The order those arrived in is not the usual one.

Superbloom is out now on EMI.