Sarah Meth has announced her debut album, Something Shameful, arriving October 30 on her own imprint, Wishbone. The London-born artist, producer, and songwriter shared the news alongside “Don’t Touch Me You’re My Hero,” a track about navigating London’s music scene as a young woman.
The video for the song turns the industry’s usual dynamic around, casting several men from that scene, including members of Shame and RIP Magic, alongside Louis O’Bryen of Sorry, who also co-produced multiple songs on the album.
Meth’s ear for music started early. Her mother signed her up for a children’s choir at four, and she spent every Sunday for twelve years immersed in classical and choral harmony, unable to read music and simply holding the sheet and guessing her way through. She wrote her first song at nine, about two classmates who had broken up, and went on to attend the BRIT School, where her peers included Black Midi, Olivia Dean, and Lola Young.
Early releases came out through the underground label Slow Dance, and Meth has since built her own Wishbone nights, a series of DIY shows where collaborators such as Tyler Hyde of Black Country, New Road, Mary in the Junkyard, Cameron Picton of My New Band Believe and Black Midi, and Wing! perform alongside her. The Guardian has called her songs “memorable odes to growing up, and falling in and out of love, that stand out in a crowded field of indie-pop newcomers.”
Something Shameful stays fixed on matters of the heart: shame and desire, yearning and letting go. Most of the record’s characters are people Meth met on a trip to New York that followed her first major UK tour, supporting King Krule. A man had invited her along and then backed out, so she went alone. “I ended up meeting so many people that week who became, at different points over the years, main characters in my life,” she says.
The recording itself moved between rooms. Some songs came together at 4AD’s London studio with in-house engineer Fabian Prynn, others with Sorry’s Louis O’Bryen, and others on a laptop in Meth’s South London bedroom, where she wrote, produced, and mixed most of the album herself.
The twelve-song album opens with its title track and closes with “Horses,” released earlier as a single. Between them sit “Cheek,” “Lonely World Girl,” and “He’s Not My Baby, He’s Nepo’s,” among others. The next preview, “I Gave You a Shell (Because I Felt Like One),” arrives September 29 ahead of the album’s release.
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