The Manchester-turned-Bristol songwriter on ‘Decoding Birdsong’, an album built from looking for meaning everywhere, and what happens when you find too much of it.
Two and a half years ago, was still marking homework. Talking about his second album, ‘Decoding Birdsong’, he says the two jobs aren’t as different as people assume. “It’s weirdly not far off,” he reflects. “They’re both an act. They’re both mostly me and then twenty or thirty percent a weird affectation.”
He left teaching in December 2023, months before anything with a label was signed. “I did leave without a record deal. Imagine going back, like, can I come back? I’ve actually fucked it,” he laughs. Terms came through that February, but he remains sceptical of the standard route into music. “Everyone goes to BIMM or Goldsmiths and all this sort of stuff,” he reasons. “I actually think my advice would be, have a real job for five years. That is genuinely the best thing that happened to me. That’s why I can write songs. Having your heart broken and breaking hearts and all that, living a life.” It shows: heartbreak resurfaces across the record, and something rawer still by its final stretch.
‘Decoding Birdsong’ is out now, and by his own account it was the harder record to make. “Both felt like they came pretty easy, but the second one was harder,” he admits. “Lyrically my bits did just flow out, but there were a few where we just couldn’t get the song.” The tracklist proved trickier still than the writing: “thinking about the story and where it needs to start, go and end.” That difficulty is audible. Across ten tracks, the record plays less like a finished statement than a document of him actually working something out, its narrator’s mental state shifting visibly from song to song, doubt curdling into clarity and back again. It’s the effort, not despite it, that makes the record such a compelling listen front to back.
That difficulty traces back to the album’s original concept. It started life under a different title entirely: ‘The Heron’. During lockdown, Szmierek walked the same stretch of the Mersey in south Manchester every day, past the same bird. “I felt like it was sort of speaking to me,” he recalls. “If it wasn’t there and I got there, it would fly in.” The idea crystallised while he was voice-noting a collaborator about an unrelated song and the heron flew past again: “I was like, that’s the record. It’s about the heron.” But one bird eventually felt too narrow a container. “Decoding birdsong is basically another way of saying you’re looking for meaning in things that other people don’t look for meaning in.”
That habit of finding significance everywhere runs through individual songs too, and Szmierek is candid about where it tips into something less healthy. He describes a period newly recognised on the streets of Manchester as “living in the Truman Show,” a phrase he now finds alarming in retrospect. “I think I was a year away from believing my own myth and becoming a full-on arsehole. So I sort of had to pull back on that a little bit.” Part of the pull-back was literal: a move to Bristol, away from the city his entire debut was built around. “You get this weird self-mythologising thing in your head where you go, well, everyone expects me to live in Manchester,” he continues. “I was happy in Bristol. I felt calmer.”
It’s a strange line to walk for someone whose entire career depends on being noticed: chasing the spotlight as a musician while quietly trying to duck out of it as a person. Szmierek is aware of the contradiction. “You don’t have to just be an artist,” he offers. “You deserve this bit of time away from it. You don’t have to go, I’m Antony Szmierek from Manchester and that will always be who I am, all the time.”
The songs themselves carry that same tension between over-thinking and letting go. ‘Godzilla Hotel’ is, he notes, “an actual blow-by-blow account” of a breakup that happened in Japan, specific enough that he checked with his ex before releasing it. ‘You’re Not Supposed To Do This Forever’ is the one he singles out unprompted. “It is a really special song,” he confesses. “I weirdly feel like I couldn’t write that again.” Whether that’s down to the tightrope it walks, between being taken seriously and written off as a novelty poetry-over-beats act, or just the writing itself, isn’t clear, but the song’s actual thesis is blunter than the anxiety around it. “We’re all going to die, and that’s the reason this all means something,” he explains. “You’re not supposed to do this forever. That’s the point. That’s why you should tell people that you love them. That’s why you should quit your job and follow your dream.”
The record’s structural hinge is ‘Flight Simulator’, co-written in the room with Imogen and the Knife, the only time he’s written a song that way. “That was magic. I’ve never really done that with anyone before.” It marks a turning point in the album’s story, built around a plane crash that forces the narrator to ask whether any of it, the noticing, the mythologising, is worth it. “It’s like a fucking monologue from a play,” he reflects on the song’s delivery, “and I think it still works as a tune.” The answer arrives immediately on ‘Dave’s Angling Superstore’, all squeezy, bass-heavy synths behind a far simpler message: find something you love and get lost in it. It was originally written as the album’s closer before Szmierek moved it into the middle of the tracklist. “Sometimes you have to be led by the music a bit,” he shrugs.
Elsewhere, the record’s two most contradictory-sounding moments, ‘The Heron’ and ‘Chalk’, sit as a study in contrast: one hushed and searching, the other one of the album’s biggest, most immediate tracks. ‘Bookie’s Favourite’ and ‘First Five Minutes of Magnolia’ are cut from similarly instant cloth, big, hooky and confident. “I really don’t like people writing about being in bands and stuff,” Szmierek admits. “Unless you’re like Bruce Springsteen. I want to hear about other stuff.” ‘Bookie’s Favourite’ is the one exception he allows himself, name-checking the label mid-verse, the record catching him mid-thought about making the thing in the first place.
Fittingly, for a record so preoccupied with looking for signs, it doesn’t end on one. ‘Aussie Gold Hunters’ was written alone in hotel rooms at 3am, during what Szmierek describes as one of the worst stretches of the year, his first experience of panic attacks. “People are telling me ‘you had a panic attack’, but inside I’m not panicking, it’s a physical thing,” he explains. Rather than resolve any of it, the album’s actual final line swerves for a joke about a daytime gameshow host instead: “punching through the plexiglass of Ben Shephard’s slot machine, we all have our tipping point.” “I don’t know why,” he shrugs. “I’m just led by my own instinct.” After an album spent decoding birdsong, it’s as good a way as any to stop.
‘Decoding Birdsong’ is out now.