·June 17, 2024·4 min read

‘Turn To Your Soul’ by Frank Joshua: a Pop Album that Journeys Through Bittersweet Heartache

‘Turn To Your Soul’ by Frank Joshua is an immersive alternative pop album. Its songs alternate between being groovy synth-pop tracks that evoke nostalgia and songs that use interesting sounds to create space in their soundscape.

There’s a warmth to the album’s overall sound, with rich and deep sounding pianos sprinkled with quirky percussion and sweeping synths. The theme of the album seems to move through the bitter-sweet phases of heartbreak. The songs travel through memory and are tinged with heartache that seems to have become a attached to those memories.

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‘Wonderful You’ to ‘Millionaire’: The Set-Up and Build-Up

The first track, ‘Wonderful You’, sets this bittersweet tone. Its instrumentation is sparse and moody, almost closed off initially. But it soon opens up into something almost transient and exhilarating. It serves as a microcosm for the journey that the rest of the album will take us on. It is an acknowledgement of grief and the pain of a healing thaw.

‘Bluebell Wood’ takes on the moodiness of the previous track, while also injecting a sense of ambience and depth. It does this with its rich, moving piano and trotting percussion. The build of this elements is calm, before the climax at the refrain feels evocative of a synth-pop track from the early 80s. It maintains an immersive sense of space while giving the album a sense of progression.

The synth-y groove of ‘You Are All I Need’ carries on this sense with its deep piano and plucky percussion. Its trendy House rhythm add a level of umph to the track, while elevating the calm, non-intrusive vibe that’s been established before it.

The Build to ‘Turn To Your Soul’

‘Patent Leather Car’ and its cascading percussion add an interesting groove to the progression to the album. This groove with the synth chords that punch through add a weight to track, a sense of bitterness and heartache. Its lyrics hint at the heart of the album’s theme.

‘Seeking To Hide’ leans into the homage to 80s synth and house music. The synths lightly trickle through during the song’s intro before the rest of the track grooves through. Its lyrics are hidden behind the song’s sycopated instrumentation while remaining in-keeping with the build-up of moods being established before.

The piano on ‘Millionaire’ is rich and layered with an interesting, pulsating percussion. It’s a calm, albiet bitter track that captures the fleeting lightness of “feeling like a million bucks”. By this point, a mood has been building and building throughout the album, in a smooth and moving way.

‘Turn To Your Soul’ to ‘Kiss’: The Turning Point and Wind Down

The title track ‘Turn To Your Soul’ is where this build reaches its climax. The syncopated guitars in the intro leads into a soft rock ballad that just swells and swells. The lyrics of the song hold the key theme of the album while the song itself, with its subtle shift is really the begin of the wind down from this point on.

‘Winter Cowboy’ uses the sparseness in the album’s overall instrumentation to good use. Its heavy but snapy piano melodies and sweeping synths seems to capture a bitter distance and loneliness. This with the song’s lyrics pair up to add a heartwretching quality to the sound that persists till the end of the album.

‘Victim’ takes on the heartache of ‘Winter Cowboy’ by referencing the song’s lyrics with the backdrop of a lighter piano. Its a bare-bones ballad with strings that give the song an almost tender feel that helps lead into the album’s wind down more fluidly.

The Wind Down

The penultimate track‘On This Night’ sounds deeper and bit more bitter. It oscillates in mood and tone while holding space for reflection in its lyrics. The song culminates into this powerful swell. A moving crescendo that could burst through your chest and ends up leaving your heart heavy by the end.

The final track on the album ‘Kiss’ is a moving acoustic track that is wholly sad. The lyrics of the song are it’s center point. They feel like they mean to say goodbye to something that was a big part of their lives once. It serves as the album’s resolution and holds heartbreak and mourning in its tone.

‘Turn To Your Soul’ by Frank Joshua takes its listeners on a healing, but uncomfortable journey through heartbreak that hasn’t been resolved. Its a moving listen that stands out for its poignancy.

The album will be out on the 28th of June!

The Artist

Frank Joshua is a singer-songwriter based in London. His music is sparse and warm, influenced by jazzy piano parts. His lyrics are painful, playful and reflective with melodies that attempt to attract a wider audience.