“There’s so few people I can think of that are held in such esteem as Dolly that are also known for being nice, more so than [for being] talented,” muses. Tucked inside an east London pub a week ahead of releasing his third album ‘life & death etc’, he’s reflecting on the recent passing of one of the record’s core touchstones. “The way she carried herself, the way she was so composed in interviews and always smiling, always kind – she didn’t take shit, but in this really kind, humorous way,” he says. “I think her essence is maybe more inspiring than her music, which is obviously also amazing.”
It was specifically ’s giggling duet with on ‘Do I Ever Cross Your Mind’ that influenced ‘life & death etc’, not only thematically (lead single ‘back of my mind’ carries a similar sentiment) but as an example of how to balance lighthearted fun with “meat on the bone” depth. It’s a balance that Martin keeps a hold of over the course of ‘life & death etc’, wrapping ruminations on love, loss and human purpose in warm, easy-going production so that even world-razing heartbreak is traversed with a veritable pep in his step.
Martin might be in the final run-up to release day, but far from a grand unveiling, putting a record out has come to feel “a bit like a wet flannel” at the end of a long box-ticking and social media-heavy few months – the centre of the album campaign “shit sandwich”, as he puts it. “There’s a really delicious sourdough bit at the front where you’re making the music and you’re getting excited and dreaming it up,” he explains, “and then at the end you’ve got the tour. It feels almost like having a baby: you’ve been pregnant, you’re being sick and it’s horrible, but then tour happens and you’re like, ‘I love this; I have a baby’, and you choose to do it again.” He pauses to laugh at himself. “Obviously, I can’t relate – guy talks about giving birth!”
The end of this particular sandwich is a European tour that kicks off in November. While the stop in Leicester where Martin grew up doesn’t quite hold the buzz of a hometown show anymore, he is at least hoping to see a few friendly faces – his piano teacher from when he was 14, for instance, or his old music tech teacher who sold him his first publishing deal for the tidy sum of £1. “Tour has this weirdly anaesthetic thing where you kind of forget about all the stress that preceded it, because everyone’s blowing smoke up your arse and your ego’s suddenly inflated,” he grins. “I am looking forward to that, for sure.”
Written alongside Grammy-winning producer and Martin’s long-term pal Matt Zara, ‘life & death etc’ follows swiftly on the heels of 2025’s ‘man oh man !’, itself released in the immediate aftermath of Martin’s year-long stint in FIZZ, the technicolour, ultra-glam supergroup completed by , and . Conscious that his time in that high-camp, heavily glittered environment had meant shelving a large part of his personality, ‘man oh man !’ tumbled out as a means of reasserting his identity as an individual as well as an artist. Once the dust from that chapter had finally settled and a semblance of calm had returned to his life, ‘life & death etc’ presented Martin with an opportunity to explore new musical avenues. “It’s so easy to be a bit formulaic once you’ve had a bit of success,” he says, of his last album’s positive reception. “Personally, I would find that creatively quite stagnant because I would feel stuck and like someone else was choosing the direction of my career. I didn’t want to do that.”
Asserting his own agency was one of the reasons he pursued his solo project in the first place, having spent several years prior writing for a host of artists including his FIZZ bandmates, , and . Despite still believing his talents are perhaps better utilised in the service of others (“the perspective is clearer – it’s hard to have perspective on yourself”) the process of mining tunes straight from the source has been a throughline of all Martin’s albums, each one a potted time capsule of his life at the point of creation. The only small drawback is the rigmarole of actually releasing them. “I feel like a square peg in a round hole,” he sighs. “I signed up to be a creative and then for a few months I’m CEO vibes, which sounds quite daddy but in reality is just fucking boring!”
‘life & death etc’ is out now.