The Big Moon Made Forever After Their Singer Lost Her Hearing
The Big Moon’s fourth record, Forever, arrives on 30 October via Fiction Records, ten tracks, four years after 2022’s Here Is Everything. Third single “Three Things” landed this week. The reason the album exists in this shape is a medical diagnosis.
Frontwoman Juliette Jackson was diagnosed with a cholesteatoma, a benign but destructive cyst of the eardrum. “I permanently lost most of the hearing on one side, which was pretty much existential, because writing songs is my job and my identity,” she told DIY when the album was announced in June.
Writing Toward a Person Who Did Not Exist Yet
What Jackson did with that is the part worth reporting properly, because it is a genuinely unusual writing method rather than a survival anecdote.
“I just decided to write songs for this imaginary time, one or two years in the future, when I would be all healed and happy again,” she said. “I didn’t know if I would ever get to that point but, by projecting and almost tricking myself into it, it actually became a really nice way of writing.”
Most records written during illness document the illness. This one is addressed to a recovery that had not happened, which produces a different kind of song: not a report from inside the difficulty, but a letter to somebody on the other side of it. That framing explains why an album born out of hearing loss is being described as buoyant rather than bleak.
Ten Tracks, and What They Are About
The tracklist runs: “Gravity”, “Three Things”, “Fun”, “F.O.R.E.V.E.R”, “Sounds”, “You Remind Me That I’m Dying (and that it’s good to be alive)”, “Speed Bump”, “Can I Get A Reading Please”, “I See You, Honey” and “Chill”.
Track six is doing the heavy lifting in that list. A song titled “You Remind Me That I’m Dying (and that it’s good to be alive)” tells you the record’s argument in one parenthesis, and it sits directly alongside a track called “Sounds” on an album made by someone who lost half of hers.
The record is described as grappling with the passage of time, life’s fragility and what is left once the major milestones have already been ticked off. That is a specific subject rather than a general mood, and it is one very little indie writing goes near, because it belongs to a stage of life the genre usually skips.
Three Singles, Three Different Arguments
Lead single “Gravity” arrived in June, buoyant and euphoric. “Fun” followed in August, and Jackson used it to make a point about what serious art is allowed to be.
“I think there’s this idea that for art to be deep it has to be SERIOUS and DARK, but joy and humour is just as integral to being a human being, and just as authentic and meaningful as the dark, painful stuff,” she said in DIY’s coverage of the second single. “Pop music forever.”
“Three Things”, out this week, is the brightly synthy one. It looks back at the freedom and possibility of being young, with Jackson describing it as being about “longing for some of that poetry in my life now” and trying to recapture the feeling of being young and immortal, per DIY’s report on the release.
Three singles, and none of them is the obvious move. A band could have led with the hearing-loss story and let the record be received as a document of hardship. Instead they led with euphoria, followed it with a defence of joy, and only then reached back for nostalgia.
What Single-Sided Hearing Loss Does to the Job
It is worth being concrete about why this is a bigger problem for a songwriter than the phrase suggests, because “lost hearing on one side” reads to most people as an inconvenience rather than an occupational threat.
Two ears are how a person locates sound in space. Lose one and the world flattens: you can still hear, but you can no longer tell where anything is coming from, and separating one voice from a room full of them becomes work rather than reflex. In a studio, that is the whole job description. Judging whether a guitar sits left or right of a vocal, whether a room sounds too wet, whether two parts are fighting each other, all of it runs through the comparison between two ears.
On a stage it is harder again. A live monitor mix is a spatial problem by definition, and a singer who cannot place the drums relative to her own voice is working from memory and muscle rather than from what she hears. Jackson’s description of the diagnosis as “pretty much existential” is precise rather than dramatic: the thing that changed was not her enjoyment of music but her access to the tools of the trade.
That context is what makes the writing method interesting rather than merely brave. Faced with an instrument that had permanently changed, she did not write about the loss. She wrote as though it had already been resolved, and then made the record on those terms. Whether that reads as denial or as craft probably depends on the listener, but it is a deliberate artistic decision and not a coping accident.
A Run of Shows Ending at Brixton
The UK tour runs through November: Birmingham’s O2 Institute 2 on the 18th, La Belle Angele in Edinburgh on the 19th, St Luke’s in Glasgow on the 20th, the Trinity Centre in Bristol on the 22nd, Concorde 2 in Brighton on the 23rd, the O2 Ritz in Manchester on the 25th, Project House in Leeds on the 26th, and the O2 Academy Brixton in London on the 27th.
Brixton is the headline number here. It is the band’s biggest headline show to date, and it sits at the end of the run rather than the start, which is how a tour is routed when the closing night is the one being built toward.
The shape of that itinerary is also a statement about scale. Seven regional rooms of a few hundred to a couple of thousand, then one venue several times larger. A band four albums in could reasonably have booked fewer, bigger nights; playing Edinburgh, Bristol and Leeds on the way to Brixton is a decision to keep the circuit rather than to skip it.
Why Four Years Between Records Is Not a Gap
The distance from Here Is Everything to Forever is four years, which by the standards of a working indie band is long. It is also, on this evidence, most of the explanation for what the album is.
A record written on a two-year cycle documents whatever was happening at the time. A record written across four, with a diagnosis and a partial recovery in the middle of them, has time to change its own mind about what it is for. The projection technique Jackson described only works over a long horizon: you cannot write toward a future self one or two years out and deliver the album in eighteen months.
Fiction Records putting it out on 30 October places it in the autumn release window, a month ahead of the tour, which is the conventional and correct sequencing. What is unconventional is a band choosing to explain the writing method this openly before anyone has heard the record.
What to Listen For on 30 October
Two things. Whether the projected-future framing holds across ten tracks or works best in single doses, because a technique that produces three strong singles does not automatically produce an album. And whether “Sounds” is what its placement suggests it is.
The Big Moon have spent four years making a record about time running and about deciding to be happy anyway, written by someone who lost part of the sense her job depends on. That is a more interesting proposition than most fourth albums, and it will be worth hearing whether the songs carry it. Fourth records are a recurring test in this scene, as with Clairo’s fourth album, which has eleven songs and no release date.
Forever is released on 30 October via Fiction Records, with the UK tour closing at the O2 Academy Brixton on 27 November.
