Noonday Dream

Noonday Dream is the third LP by an English musician and composer Ben Howard. Produced by Ben himself and his bandmate Mickey Smith, Noonday Dream follows his 2014 critically praised album I Forget Where We Were. The album title comes from the poem A Noon-Day Dream, by Scottish writer Thomas Pringle.

In an interview with Annie Mac, Howard discussed his inspirations for the record:

The first sessions were in Sawmills, we sat in there and that place got real spirit. Quite an amazing place, we sat down by the river and stuff. And that was the first kind of shred of real inspiration, like we should explore what we were playing. I think I’ve kind of had a strange… I’ve always been a fan of Talk Talk. Their last record was something that I shared with a few people. I’ve always loved Spirit of Eden and I think that was our idea. Like, ‘let’s go to Sawmill and record like hours and hours of music and then just cut it up’… It never happened, of course, and the record sounds nothing like Talk Talk. But that was the first time we were like, ‘oh we could make an instering record regardless’.

In the early hours of April 14th, the album was accidentally leaked through Ben’s French Label, Tôt ou Tard, where a private playlist containing the album was made public on Soundcloud. A few hours later the playlist was taken down. Noonday Dream was subsequently leaked online on April 27, 2018, more than a month before scheduled release date.