JJerome87, the solo project of alt-J frontman Joe Newman, has shared “Mr. Alligator,” the final preview of his debut solo album The Canyon, out now via Mushroom Music and Virgin Music Group.
Serving as the album’s opening track, “Mr. Alligator” introduces Newman’s solo world with a blues-soaked, cinematic edge. The song is built around field recordings collected by Newman himself, including the sounds of a double-dutch group, turning an everyday moment into something stranger, darker, and more theatrical.
Newman describes the track as “the path of a Preacher” and “the rise of a Predator,” calling it “the story of a grifter with a penchant for coercive control, violence and a soulless indifference towards their fellow man.” It is a sharp, unsettling entry point into a record that appears to blur fact, fiction, memory, and myth into a set of compact musical short stories.
The single arrives with an official visualizer featuring Irish illustrator Sally Dunne, who also created the artwork for The Canyon. Filmed in a single take, the visualizer captures Dunne inking a new illustration inspired by the track, giving “Mr. Alligator” a tactile, hand-drawn companion piece that matches the song’s storybook menace.
The Canyon marks Newman’s first solo album outside alt-J, the Grammy-nominated, Mercury Prize and Ivor Novello-winning band that became one of the most distinctive alternative acts of the past decade. Across four albums, alt-J have topped the U.K. charts, reached the Billboard Top Five, earned multiple Grammy and BRIT nominations, and amassed billions of streams.
Where alt-J’s sound has always come from the unlikely chemistry between three different creative voices, JJerome87 gives Newman room to follow a more personal thread. The Canyon pulls from childhood influences, new fatherhood, Los Angeles imagery, and the strange emotional weather of a major life transition. You know, the usual light material: birth, memory, coyotes, Hollywood ghosts, and the terrifying realization that your own life has become source material.
Newman began writing the record after alt-J’s 2022 album The Dream, during a period when he expected to step back creatively but found himself moving in the opposite direction. Becoming a first-time father brought a wave of personal ideas, including memories of his partner giving birth and the early days of parenthood.
“Traditionally, after finishing an album, I’m creatively a bit depleted, so I’ll take a break,” Newman explains. “But after The Dream, I didn’t stop writing, and I started formulating a lot of ideas that were very personal: things I was experiencing as a first-time dad, and the core memories of my partner giving birth. I was beginning to realise this might be a good time for me to take a leap of faith and write something outside the circle of alt-J.”
Recorded in Los Angeles with producer Carlos de la Garza, The Canyon features a handpicked group of top session musicians and a trio of female backing vocalists. The album also includes previously released singles “Brush Me Like A Horse” and “Track and Field.”
The album’s title nods to Canyon Coffee in Echo Park, a regular stop during the recording process. Its artwork, created by Sally Dunne, is filled with clues to the record’s world, including a white house near the studio where Matt Damon and Ben Affleck wrote “Good Will Hunting,” coyotes Newman encountered during a 5 a.m. drive, and an image of his daughter peeking over his shoulder.
Across The Canyon, Newman appears to be building something intimate but not small. The songs move like vivid snapshots, turning personal memories and ordinary scenes into stories that feel slightly heightened, cinematic, and strange. It is the kind of solo debut that does not simply say, “Here is what I sound like without my band.” It says, “Here is the part of my imagination that did not quite fit anywhere else.” Much better. Less legally awkward for everyone involved.
With his London headline show at Bush Hall now sold out, JJerome87 has also announced his first New York headline show at Bowery Ballroom on October 3.
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