The Pop Corporation

David Byrne is one of those artists that, to his legions of devotees, defies criticism. There’s a few artists like that, who when mentioned, people get that faraway look in their eyes and simply won’t hear anything said against them.

It must be a nice place to be, if you’re David Byrne (although you worry about the amount of sycophants he must meet in an average day) and, largely, he’s good value for it. After all, he was in one of America’s greatest groups Talking Heads. In addition to that, he’s partially responsible for the reappraisal of psychedelic music from Brazil, thanks to his Luaka Bop label.

However, there’s always a nagging doubt around Byrne. The various spats with his former band have been petty and dismissed by his devotees because, no, it is surely everyone else’s fault. Yet, always there was the mutterings about him making Tina Weymouth re-audition of the group when they landed their first deal in 1976, and in later years, the rest of the group finding out he was leaving the band by reading it in press rather than hearing it from the man himself.

If we put it down to the folly of youth, and Byrne mellowing with old age, we now look at 2025 and his new album ‘Who Is The Sky?’, which saw Dave saying “at my age, at least for me, there’s a ‘don’t give a shit about what people think’ attitude that kicks in,” which is probably a good thing.

We say that because, while Byrne likes to do interesting things, his post-Talking Heads career hasn’t exactly been crammed with successes – and no, we’re not talking about the charts. His song ‘Glass Concrete & Stone’ from 2004 showed that he still had some of that originality of his old group, and of course, his dance hit ‘Lazy’ with X-Press 2 saw him flirting with something as ugly as success. Mainly though, Byrne has run the channels in that sort of hipster NYC loft gathering, appearing like a Jack In A Box on late night talk shows and the like.

On ‘Who Is The Sky?’, he’s teamed up with Ghost Train Orchestra, and the album was lead by ‘Everybody Laughs’, which revitalises Byrne’s love of what he’s dubbed ‘Island Music’ in the past, with a gently tropical swing and an almost childlike melody over the top. The wide-eyed wonder of it all might be off-putting for someone looking for the bite that existed in Byrne’s best work of yesteryear, but like he said, he “don’t give a shit what people think.”

As well as the island vibes, you get a sorta baroque pop too, and a host of younger artists in the shape of Hayley Williams and St Vincent, while he muses about the absurdity of life and occasionally laughing at how silly everything is.

‘When We Are Singing’ and the Williams’ featuring ‘What Is The Reason For It?’ is when the album works better, with squirrelly grooves and some spice in the chord progressions. Elsewhere, you can help but stare at titles like ‘I’m An Outsider’, ‘I Met The Buddha At A Downtown Party’, and ‘The Avant Garde’ and end up grinding your teeth a bit.

On the face of it, Byrne’s wackiness and blithe positivity is probably worth cheering about, but the spirit of positivity that permeates the album in one of the darkest years in recent history seems manically jarring.

Maybe that’s our fault and we should lighten up? However, that’s the thing with people trying to make you smile – sometimes it’s just irritating. And the jokiness of chunks of the album is really underlined in ‘Moisturizing Thing’, which is a song about someone using an anti-ageing cream that works so well, the protagonist ends up looking like a toddler.

There’s a sense that this album will garner better reviews than perhaps it deserves, mainly on goodwill from liking Talking Heads, or the ultra-sharp re-do of ‘Stop Making Sense’ or whatever, but if you’re looking at this album in a vacuum, it’s just okay.

The rallying call of “everybody lives, dies, laughs, cries, sleeps and stares at the ceiling…” is probably true and all, but it doesn’t hit as some relatable truism, rather, more like one of those rich kids who decides to take a year off to travel the world in a tricked out van, to tell us how there’s so much beauty in the world if we just reconnected with it.

On paper, a hectic punk teaming up with Harry Style’s producer to make a samba track about paranoia sounds fantastic. Sadly, it left us wanting.

It’s sure nice that he’s around still, and regularly being a kooky New York guy, and that’s something at least.