Musically and creatively, Emma-Jean Thackray's second album Weirdo bridges grunge, pop, soul and jazz, channelling George Clinton and Kurt Cobain in the award-winning artist’s powerfully idiosyncratic style.

Virtuosic musicality and self-expression is combined with humour in this triumphant exploration of loss, recovery and gratitude. Playing and recording every instrument, writing, singing and arranging all of the songs and producing, recording and mixing the whole album, alone in her south London flat, Weirdo is a truly remarkable achievement on every level: compositionally, lyrically and personally.

Born in West Yorkshire, Emma-Jean grew up in a low-income, working class family. This alone makes her unusual, when over 92% of actors, musicians and writers grew up cushioned by medium or high-income backgrounds, according to the Office for National Statistics. This proudly neurodivergent artist’s musical journey began in primary school, playing a cornet her parents had bought her from a second-hand music shop. She spent her teens as Principle Cornet and Trumpet in several notable brass bands and orchestras, going on to study at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama and then Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance in south London. 

Her first EP, Walrus, was self-released at a time when a wave of successful instrumentalists were emerging. Emma-Jean’s sound, though, always incorporated the widest range of music, from spiritual jazz and funk to Detroit house and techno, northern Bassline and ultra-catchy rock and pop music. In 2018 she released the boundary-defying Ley Lines drawing comparisons with US heavyweights including Madlib. 

A regular on BBC6 Music, including covering shows for Mary Anne Hobbs and on Worldwide FM, she’s also become an in-demand DJ, playing dancefloor-destroying sets worldwide. She bridges worlds: directing the London Symphony Orchestra and performing at Glastonbury five times in one year. In 2019 Jazz FM nominated her as their Breakthrough Act of the Year. Two years later she won the public vote for Act of the Year, and in 2022 Yellow was awarded Album of The Year.

As well as attracting national attention, she’s applied a consistently self-starter ethos to music. EPs on her label Movementt: the tribal improvisations of Um Yang, ethereal, psychedelic funk of Rain Dance in 2020 and the cathartic freeness of Talking Therapy Ensemble in 2022 signalled her exceptional talent. In 2023 the life-long Taoist signed a major deal with Brownswood and Parlophone.

The story of her second album, Weirdo, began as she was finishing her 2021 debut Yellow when she sketched out five tracks that appear on this phenomenal follow-up. And then it began again, in summer 2023, as a practical and creative way of emerging from six months deep in the abyss of bereavement. Exploring and celebrating the isolation of being different – the titular weirdo – and nurtured by the life-shaping weight of loss, it is both acutely individual and powerfully universal. 

An artist’s life will always appear in their work, meaning that the lines between public and personal can become blurred. Given the centrality of grief to this record it is sensible to say that Weirdo became a way of processing trauma, specifically the death of her long-term partner who died suddenly and unexpectedly from natural causes in January 2023. 

The album is full of irrepressible instant classics, written, played, and arranged with staggering skill and verve and conveying a huge spectrum of human emotion and experience. Maybe Nowhere swings heavily into action, waves of guitars transporting bleak couplets. In contrast, try listening to the brilliantly catchy Save Me without singing along before the song reaches the end of the first play. Wanna Die skips and skitters through the worst moments with brutal honesty and arresting warmth, whilst Thank You For The Day is an iconic, hands-in-the-air anthem that emerged from life’s wreckage. It’s Nirvana, for the dancefloor. Personality shines through especially strongly in the short songs peppered throughout – like the ultra-catchy Fried Rice – tracks Emma-Jean describes as being more like diary entries than skits.

Two brilliant features from American artists appear, signals from the outside world tempering insularity. Comedian, musician, beatboxer and actor Reggie Watts appears on the superlative P-funk of Black Hole whilst Seattle drummer and bandleader Kassa Overall adds fresh voice to the radiant genius of It’s Okay. Life-affirming and connective, Weirdo is the kind of album that emerges once in a generation, made by a wholly unique artist. It is everything. All at once.