GUM - BLUE GUM WAY - P(DOOM)

One of Australia’s most prolific and explorative artists, GUM (aka Jay Watson also of Pond & Tame Impala), releases his seventh album, Blue Gum Way.

His first for King Gizzard’s p(doom) records, he has also shared “In Life,” the latest track from the album about which he said: “This song is about a fork in the road, a sliding doors moment where your life could have been completely different based on one decision.”

Confident, emotive and immersive, Blue Gum Way stands as GUM’s boldest and most refined statement to date, and it follows the release of the 2023 GUM album, Saturnia and more recently his 2024 collaboration with Gizzard’s Ambrose Kenny-Smith on the album Ill Times.

Self-produced, the track listing of the album, the title of which title references Australia’s blue gum eucalyptus trees, subtly nods to melancholy, place and atmosphere.

Jay Watson has spent more than a decade releasing music under his GUM moniker, building a catalogue defined by bold experimentation and stylistic left turns. But with Blue Gum Way, which draws influence from artists such as Talk Talk, John Martyn and Radiohead, he steps away from restless eclecticism to create a cohesive, mood-driven work. Across nine songs, the album settles into a widescreen, jazz-inflected psychedelic space — stately, graceful and tinged with melancholy — reflecting an artist newly certain of his voice.

The shift was partly a reaction to Watson’s other projects. Recent sessions with Pond “came together really fast – we were calling it pub-rock!”, while his collaboration with Ambrose Kenny-Smith leaned toward “real two- or three-chord music, really rootsy.” By contrast, Blue Gum Way began with harmonically rich keyboard passages that were “really jazz-inspired, really harmonically dense,” setting the tone for a record designed to inhabit a single emotional world.

“When you string together lots of different ideas, albums become like mixtapes of conflicting styles, and that can be cool,” Watson says. “But Blue Gum Way is steeped in thoughts and emotions that are so personal that it wouldn’t work to make it with other people.” Working largely alone allowed him to lean further into vulnerability.

Lyrics, once secondary, have become central to his process. “I wrote them out of necessity for years,” he admits. Now, his writing explores anxiety and anticipation with oblique precision. “All my solo music has been about anxiety, really… A chord-change can reveal more about what you’re trying to say than words.”

Though he wrestled with doubt — “Is this too boring or too slow?” — Watson trusted his instincts. “Music is like my religion, my spirituality… If you go with your gut and have enough stabs at something, it always works out.”