Felicity J Lord – FJL
Mirek Dostál
Album
Opening Act.
Try typing Felicity J Lord into a search engine. Instead of a band, you’ll land on the website of a London estate agent and a handful of forum threads warning you to steer well clear. That, by all accounts, is the whole point. Beyond the first names Ben, Joel, Gustav and Rosie, there’s very little to learn about the quartet behind FJL. They describe themselves as a gang of misfits, internet lurkers, poets and forever-kids, and as “a company, a family, a video game, a never-ending play in two acts”. To me, they remain shrouded in mystery, which only adds to the magic of their music.
I came across them through one of my favourite labels, STROOM. Born out of the online radio station stroom.tv, the Belgian imprint balances reissues of overlooked electronic music with some real gems of the here and now. FJL is one of them.
The album came out in September 2025, both digitally and on 180g vinyl. It’s a joint release between STROOM and the Ghent-based label Lise, and the latter’s very first. According to the release notes, the record was pieced together between France, Germany, Turkey and England, and the two sides of the LP carry the fitting titles Opening Act and Closing Act.
British melancholy, grey skies, damp bedsits.
Brevity is the soul of wit, as the saying goes, and Felicity J Lord take it literally. The album packs 26 tracks into 38 minutes, which works out at just under a minute and a half per track. Nearly half of them are over within a minute, the shortest don’t even reach twenty seconds, and not even the longest, “£orP”, crosses the four-minute mark. At first, I struggled to make sense of it. Most of the tracks feel like half-finished demos with plenty of potential: an idea takes shape, picks a direction, and before the band can wring everything out of it, they’ve already moved on. With repeated listens, though, I’ve come to see it as a genuinely fascinating concept, and I’m in awe of just how many musical ideas this record holds. Stretch the tracks out to a conventional length and there’d be enough material for several standalone albums.
Sonically, FJL is a collage in the best sense of the word. Phone recordings, chopped-and-screwed samples, voice notes that double as nursery rhymes, folk and trip-hop songs, echoes of ’90s indie and R&B. The opener borrows a slowed-down snippet of The Sundays’ “Can’t Be Sure” and sets the tone straight away: British melancholy, grey skies, damp bedsits. Reviewers often hear shades of Dean Blunt in it; I’d add a healthy dose of acid.
There’s something almost Zen about it.
The tracks are wildly varied in sound, and each one conjures a vivid sense of the place you happen to find yourself in. Just look at the tracklist: “Restaurant”, “Pub”, “Backstage”, “Royal Ballet School”, “Astro Turf”. The album plays like a map of London at dusk, flicked through faster than you can keep up. There’s something almost Zen about it. Nothing holds, nothing plays out, every moment slips away before you can grasp it. All that’s left is the present.
FJL isn’t background music. It asks for your attention, a pair of headphones and a front-to-back listen, because only as a whole do all those fragments start to make sense. For me, it’s no exaggeration to call it my album of 2025. The vinyl has sold out at the label, but you can still grab the album digitally on Bandcamp.
Closing Act.
And if Felicity J Lord the estate agents ever offer you a viewing, don’t think twice. This property has 26 rooms, and every one of them is worth lingering in.