Hot Fruit, third solo, pressure in the voice
World’s Strongest Man arrived on 4 May 2018 as Gaz Coombes’s third solo studio album, issued on Hot Fruit Recordings with Caroline. It followed Matador (2015) and put the former Supergrass frontman back in the UK Top 15, peaking at No. 12. Coombes co-produced with Ian Davenport; tracking centered on Courtyard Studio in Oxford, with Craig Silvey mixing and Bob Ludwig mastering.
The title sounds like a boast. The record undercuts it. Coombes talked about Grayson Perry’s writing on masculinity, Frank Ocean’s Blonde, Neu!, hip-hop drums, and British woodland walks. Synth beds, drum loops, and textured guitars replace the bright Britpop rush of the 1990s. Hooks are there, but they unfold slowly under whispers and cool walls of sound rather than stadium choruses.
Lead single Deep Pockets set the tone in January 2018: paranoia, late-night motion, a clipped groove. Coombes shot and edited the video himself on a small budget in Los Angeles, staging a surreal car-pool ride to match the lyric. Walk the Walk and the title track keep that mid-tempo pulse. Deeper cuts like The Oaks, Oxygen Mask, and Weird Dreams stretch into mood pieces where anxiety and ego sit in plain view.
Caroline International handled wider distribution while Hot Fruit kept the indie stamp on the sleeve. Critics noted the shift from Supergrass bounce toward adult unease: fewer shout-along choruses, more attention to how a loop and a vocal phrase share a bar. That patience is why the album rewards second listens more than first-week playlists.
Inspired variously by Grayson Perry’s the Descent of Man, Frank Ocean’s Blonde, Californian weed, British woodlands, unchecked masculinity, Neu! and hip hop.
(Album announcement via NME, 2018)
Eleven tracks run about forty-two minutes. Nothing overstays. Compared with Supergrass singles built for radio impact, this album favors restraint: dry drums, soft-focus keys, guitars used as texture more than riff engines. That choice fits a songwriter in his forties asking what strength looks like when the performance of it collapses.
Live, Coombes took the songs to London and a US run after years of quieter solo gaps. The album did not chase chart fashion; it charted anyway and sat beside a wave of 2018 records that married laptop rhythm to singer-songwriter detail. For listeners who only knew him from Alright and Caught by the Fuzz, World’s Strongest Man is the clearest map of his solo lane: melodic, uneasy, and carefully built.
It remains a useful checkpoint between Matador and the later Turn the Car Around. The title still reads like a joke until the songs start; then it reads like a warning Coombes wrote to himself and left on tape.
By the time Turn the Car Around arrived years later, this album already marked the point where Coombes trusted mid-tempo writing over nostalgia. That choice still defines how his solo catalog is read.
