James Ellis Ford – The Ever After
James Ellis Ford has spent the better part of two decades on the other side of the glass, producing Arctic Monkeys, Blur, and Depeche Mode. More recently, he released the Mercury-nominated Help(2) compilation for War Child, alongside his work as one half of Simian Mobile Disco. “The Ever After” is the second single from his second solo album Lost In Another World, out 14 August on Domino.
Ford made the record in early 2025 on a hospital ward, between rounds of chemotherapy following a diagnosis of acute myeloid leukaemia. He wrote, played, sang, recorded, and mixed all of it himself in just over two weeks, working off a laptop and a cheap mic. Then a few synths set up on a foldaway IKEA bedside table his wife Sereen brought in. Staff learned to take his blood pressure around his vocal takes. He’s described the finished thing as a photograph, a time capsule, and left it more or less untouched once he got home.
None of that context is audible in “The Ever After”, which is the interesting part. Ford went looking for something to lift his mood and landed on dance music, and what came out is bright, bleepy synthpop with his Simian Mobile Disco instincts sitting right on the surface. He’s said his mind went to “my little 8-year-old boy Frank”, and the song works as a straight piece of optimism rather than anything braced against the circumstances that produced it. Elsewhere on the album he’s blunter about the treatment, the pain of it and the doubt that it’s helping, but here he keeps his eyes forward.
