If you want to get Jake Bugg rolling, bring up English football. Sitting in a room of his London home on a late Friday afternoon just before happy hour, Bugg is beaming as he jokes about Manchester City’s fate and points to both a framed, signed game-used Wayne Rooney Three Lions jersey and a Notts County kit bearing his name on the front. This wasn’t one of those shirts that you can buy and personalize. Rather, Bugg was the club’s kit sponsor, a thrill for the lifelong Notts County fan.
Talking football aside, Bugg, showing up via Zoom, has said in the past that he doesn’t fully like interviews. On this day, that’s certainly not the case. When it comes to speaking about his career, Bugg is in a more contemplative mood.
Specifically, he calls back to moments of isolation, and acknowledges times when he’s been ignored or suppressed. He confronts all of these issues on the new Alamo, his seventh studio album and first non-major-label release. They were difficult emotions and memories to parse, but he insists he’s better off for it. Besides, as Bugg says: “I got a record out of it.”
Looking back at his early music career, which started more as the hobby of a teen growing up in Nottingham and quickly turned into a profession, Bugg knows his experience is vastly different from that of others his age. In 2011, then just 16, he played the BBC Introducing stage at Glastonbury and saw his profile rise through prominent sync placements. Bugg’s first album, his self-titled 2012 debut, drew comparisons to early Bob Dylan, with a gusto similar to the Gallaghers (he’d go on to open for Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Birds).
At the time of its release, Rolling Stone wrote that “Jake Bugg shows an artist who is crazy fully formed, stepping into a journey that should be worth following.” The album peaked at Number One on the U.K. album charts and at No. 75 on the Billboard 200. His next album was produced by Rick Rubin, and in the years since, he opened for the Rolling Stones, shared a stage with Johnny Marr and Michael Kiwanuka, and later played guitar on Johnny Blue Skies’ Passage du Desir album.
But with the fame came the paparazzi. Who Bugg hung out with became tabloid fodder, causing him to retreat, physically and emotionally. He poured himself into his music, finding comfort in expressing himself through the medium.
Now a more well-seasoned 32-year-old, Bugg looks back on that time in the spotlight with a wary eye. Unlike its predecessor, 2024’s A Modern Day Distraction, which focused on the working class and societal inequality, Alamo finds him taking a long look inside. The cover art, shot by Bugg’s pal Kevin Westenberg just outside of Memphis, is similar to the last scene in Cast Away, where Tom Hanks stands and stares at a rural intersection with no one around, smiling that he can choose whatever path he wants. In the past year, he lost family and friends, with his relationships suffering as a result.
“To write this album, I had to come out somewhat on the other side of it,” Bugg says of what he calls the most challenging year of his life. “I was isolating myself and indulging in things that weren’t the best for me. When you’re experiencing a lot of the things I’m talking about on the record, and as personal as I’m being, in that moment of those experiences, you don’t realize kind of how bad it or how dark it gets, which was the hardest time in my adult life.”
Recorded at Hoxa Headquarters in London with producer Jimmy Hogarth and songwriter/guitarist Steve McEwen, Alamo is a callback to the indie-folk sound that marked his earlier albums. “The Life,” with its lyric “living the life will kill me in the end,” is particularly delicate, while “Everywhere I Go” startles with its sparseness: Bugg says both tracks are the best representation of Alamo as a whole. (But we particularly like “Go Away” and the evocative “Tall Poppies.”)
For Bugg, this all represents the long run he’s taken to get to where he is now: relaxed, confident, and, like his football heroes, grounded on a level pitch.
“A lot of the time, I sat at home doing what I call passive songwriting, where I’m just watching soccer, just playing to my guitar, singing and not realizing what I’m doing,” he says. “Whether it’s good is a different story, but it’s the thing I love doing the most.”
