Ben Howard, turning two mini-strokes into the most sonically restless album of his career

The guitar went first. Not because Ben Howard‘s hands stopped working after the mini-strokes — they didn’t — but because the open-D fingerpicking he had practised since adolescence, the sound that built his audience and earned him two BRIT Awards, suddenly felt like someone else’s answer. What he put in its place — drum machines, an echoplex, questions he could not quite finish asking — was the most honest reckoning he had produced with the specific weight of being alive and uncertain.

Howard was born in Richmond in southwest London and moved to Totnes in Devon when he was around eight, arriving into a household where his parents played John Martyn, Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell and Simon and Garfunkel. The Atlantic surf culture of the southwest coast came next. He started writing songs at eleven, enrolled in a journalism course at Falmouth College of Arts and left six months in, having already found that the surf community’s responses to his playing felt more like a direction than a curriculum.

The self-released EPs came first — Games in the Dark, These Waters, Old Pine — passed around on USB sticks and sold at Devon shows. Island Records signed him in 2011, a label he chose in part because of its history with English folk artists. The debut album Every Kingdom followed the same year, reaching number four on the UK Albums Chart and going triple platinum. At twenty-five he won two BRIT Awards — Best British Breakthrough Act and Best British Male Solo Artist — alongside a Mercury Prize nomination. The prize for all that success was a public identity he would spend the next decade quietly complicating.

I Forget Where We Were, released in 2014, debuted at number one in the UK and consolidated his position as one of British folk’s most consistent commercial presences. The album was darker and more textured than its predecessor, but critics largely received it as a refinement rather than a departure. Noonday Dream in 2018 moved further from the acoustic centre, absorbing drone and atmosphere in ways that his fanbase noticed but music press coverage often flattened. Collections from the Whiteout, made with producer Aaron Dessner over eighteen months across studios in New York and Paris, arrived in 2021 with a sound that owed as much to The National’s production vocabulary as to the Devonian folk tradition.

The disconnect between the artist Howard was becoming and the artist his reputation assumed him to be had become, by the early 2020s, a productive friction. His gift for a certain kind of intimacy — the guitar very close, the voice close behind it, the sense of overhearing rather than performing — became the frame through which everything else was understood, even when everything else was clearly something different. Noonday Dream’s atmospheric sprawl and Collections from the Whiteout’s post-rock production were absorbed into the pastoral folk narrative, which said more about the limitations of music journalism than it did about his actual trajectory.

Is It?, recorded in ten days at a studio in southwestern France following the two transient ischemic attacks of March 2022, is the clearest evidence that the pastoral narrative had stopped fitting. The album opens with a drum machine, proceeds through echoplexed sessions, flute from Mick McGoldrick, violin from Raven Bush, and sampled beats. The TIAs had briefly cost Howard the capacity to think and speak clearly; what came back when that capacity returned was not the sound that preceded the crisis but something that had passed through difficulty and emerged still uncertain — an accurate account of what that kind of difficulty actually produces.

He has surfed since childhood, a practice that runs through his life and several album covers. He married fashion entrepreneur Agatha Lintott in May 2025, having been together for more than a decade. He quit smoking after the TIAs. The Devon quiet — surf, distance from London, the Atlantic — remains both backdrop and working method.

The tenth anniversary of I Forget Where We Were brought a deluxe reissue in 2024, including four previously unreleased tracks from that era, and a sold-out UK tour that closed at the Eventim Apollo in London, confirming that the audience built in 2011 and 2014 is still paying close attention. Howard is currently on tour through late 2026, with stops in the UK, across Europe, and in North America including the Shaky Knees Music Festival in Atlanta and the Sea.Hear.Now Festival in Asbury Park in September. The question Is It? poses — three words that refuse to resolve — remains open.

Tags: Folk, singer-songwriters, Aaron Dessner, Ben Howard, Every Kingdom, I Forget Where We Were

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