Two brand-new albums from Jim Bob in one day: An act of artistic ambition or the stupidest marketing plan ever?
“Someone’s telling her of a golden age. When her parents and her teachers were young / they had The Cure and The Smiths / Johnny Marr’s riffs / the Cramps and the Pogues / The Teardrop Explodes.”
On August 22 (2025) Jim Bob, ‘neo-punk’ balladeer, man about town and former singer with Carter USM, released two albums on the same day- the thirteenth and fourteenth of his solo career. Not a double album you understand. That would be too simple, too artistically unambitious. These are entirely separate albums. An act of artistic ambition or the stupidest marketing plan ever?
The last and maybe only artist to pull such a crazy stunt were Bright Eyes who released I’m Wide Awake It’s Morning and Digital Ash in a Digital Urn on the same day in 2005. Not to worry though. The recent Jim Bob release seems to have been an artistic and commercial success which, according to a tongue-in-cheek social media post from Jim Bob (transcribed below), was never part of the plan:
With these albums we decided to not worry about chart positions. In fact, we deliberately sabotaged any chance of getting anywhere in the charts by not selling as many copies as previous Jim Bob records. This was our master plan. We would confuse the market by releasing two different and different sounding albums on the same day. We’d call them Automatic and Stick, knowing that nobody in the UK would know that ‘stick’ was American for ‘manual’, as in cars (automobiles). Five months after announcing the records, everything had gone according to plan. We’d managed to keep album reviews to the bare minimum, nothing that couldn’t be counted on the fingers of one hand. We’d successfully avoided being included in any Spotify playlists, and if it wasn’t for the sabotage of Steve Lamacq and Mickey Bradley, we would have got away with zero national radio airplay. We submitted me as a guest for various podcasts knowing none of them would be interested. It worked perfectly. We managed to get nothing in the newspapers. No clickbait stories on NME.com or other music websites. Both albums flew under the media radar, an almost perfect clandestine and covert operation. We were on course to repeat the failure of other albums that were flops when first released. Albums such as Hunky Dory, Pet Sounds and Velvet Underground & Nico. Our almost half a year of deliberate and wilful commercial suicide would surely have paid off. So, imagine our disappointment when Automatic and Stick were the 25th and 17th biggest selling physical albums in the UK, with Automatic at number 5 in the independent album chart, and Stick at number 3, making it the highest charting independent Jim Bob solo album ever. Absolute fucking disaster.
I suppose you might as well buy more copies of Automatic and Stick now. Follow the link – which with the help of the social media companies we’ve repeatedly tried to hide from you. If you can’t see the link here, we’ve hidden it in the comments or ‘in the bio’, whatever that means.
So, of course, I don’t want to scupper this “clandestine and covert operation” by reviewing them for We Are Cult but these two albums really are excellent.
The albums were both recorded in the studio at the same time but Automatic is definitely the more epic-sounding of the two and uses the full band and backing vocalists that appeared on Jim Bob’s previous solos Pop Up Jim Bob, Who Do We Hate Today and Thanks For Reaching Out. It even includes an appearance from Jim Bob’s toddler granddaughter on the track Thank You Driver.
Automatic opens with Victoria Knits the Wars, about a woman who, perhaps inspired by the knitted figures you see on post boxes takes things to extremes by depicting wars and makes “Tapestries of death or glory”. The next track Danny from Nowhere is a fictional account of a kid caught up in drug dealing and county lines from a young age and really having no hope. Jim Bob sings: “I’ve broken a promise that I made to myself/I’d never write another one of these songs.” Along with the later song, the disturbing Frank Bought a Drone which has the line “He watches the world through an app on his phone” these are snapshots (or aerial shots?) of desperate lives.
Can You Hear Us at The Back of the Hall is a song about influence pigeonholing; a new band being compared to what went before with Jim Bob reading out a litany of golden age bands: “Someone’s telling her of a golden age. When her parents and her teachers were young / they had The Cure and The Smiths / Johnny Marr’s riffs / the Cramps and the Pogues / The Teardrop Explodes.”
Shoefiti is the longest and probably the best song on this first album. Starting slowly with a Jonathan Richman-esque slow guitar, it begins telling a Succession-style story about families and wealth before ditching the glitz and glamour with optimistic lyrics about new birth and the beauty of shoes.
The second album, Stick is more direct and optimistic. First song, A Song By Me, is about wishing for an alternative universe of positive and uplifting social media “Send me down a rabbit hole of magic and wonder/Yes please.”
Art describes an incident where Jim Bob is emotionally overwhelmed after seeing one of the Degas Woman Combing Her Hair pictures at the National Gallery and is another litany song celebrating art. Lover’s Rock (not the Clash song) is an absolute belter about slot machine romance, aging and nostalgia which sounds like a Carter USM song with more mature lyrics.
On this album we also get one of Jim Bob’s classic Lean on Me type songs with I Will Still Be Here, a lovely song about contemplation I Go to the Park and a celebration of dandyism and individuality in Every Day’s A Disco.
So, an artistic and commercial success then? Definitely. In Jim Bob’s own words from the tweet above what an “Absolute Fucking Disaster”.
❉ Jim Bob: ‘Automatic’ (CD: CDBRED927, RRP £12.99 / LP: BRED927, RRP £24.99) and ‘Stick’ (CD: CDBRED928, RRP £12.99 / LP: BRED928, RRP £24.99) were both released on August 22 2025 by Cherry Red Group. For ordering details and more information, visit Jim Bob’s artist page on the Cherry Red Records website.
❉ Currently co-writing a book on Steven Wells, James Collingwood is based in West Yorkshire and has been writing for a number of years. He currently also writes for the Bradford Review magazine for which he has conducted more than 30 interviews and has covered music, film and theatre. Bluesky: jamescollingwood.bsky.social
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