Broke My Heart is Brighton based, 24 year old singer-songwriter Jacob Phillips’s first release of the year and it offers an intriguing slice of youthful, lovelorn insouciance and jangling guitars in its brief but charming few minutes. Performing under the Lazy Days banner, he offers up here a fine exercise in guitar pop and direct lyrical refrains and is clearly at home with a deceptively simple but hook-laden melody.
There is an almost baggy swing to the strum of 90s guitar and a Stone Roses inflected simplicity to the double—tracked vocal melody, the rhyme scheme at times playfully stretching phonology to meet the meter. All of this is underpinned by the unfussy and driving beat that propels this pop piece to its echoey conclusion. A soporific, half-cut quality seems central to the song’s delivery which adds to its charm, the lyrics unambiguous but heartfelt and full of questioning longing.
This single is apparently building up to the release of a longer E.P when summer finally arrives. It will be exciting to see what this will include. Broke My Heart should certainly be catalyst enough to want to explore this further.
Written by M. A. Welsh (Misophone)