Jake Bugg: On My One

In November 2013—the same week he released his sophomore album, Shangri-La—Jake Bugg told NME, “I want to make an acoustic record, something not necessarily with big choruses. For example, [Nick Drake’s] Pink Moon, you take one of those tracks separately, it doesn’t stand up, but if you take it all together and it creates a mood, an atmosphere.”
Back in February, Bugg released the title track to his third album, On My One, a short and fragile acoustic track that validated the aforementioned Pink Moon narrative. “I’m just a poor boy from Nottingham / I had my dreams / But in this world they’re gone, they’re gone / Oh, I’m so lonesome on my one” he sings in his now trademark nasally voice, harkening back to themes of escape from his first record. Over a fingerpicked riff not too different than Nick Drake’s “Know,” Bugg shows that he can’t fully leave the “speed bump city” that he so desperately wanted to get out of in 2012’s “Trouble Town.”
But that acoustic record without big choruses only exists for the first 2:14 of On My One, blown apart by an upbeat processed drum machine beat for the album’s second track, “Gimme the Love.” Filled with quick, almost rapped lyrics and synths aplenty, it’s without a doubt the most poppy Bugg has gone over the course of his three albums. Unfortunately, his voice just doesn’t do himself any favors on a track like this—it’s simply much more suited for the nu-folk sound that initially won him widespread fame.