There is a particular kind of album that comes together almost by accident, assembled from forgotten fragments and unearthed gems rather than conceived as a unified statement, and yet reveals, once assembled, a thread running through it that no one quite planned. Tom Emlyn‘s Passing Craze, released May 15, 2026, is exactly this kind of album, fourteen tracks drawn from forgotten songs and fragments going back to Emlyn’s first teenage songwriting, gathered together for what began as a university production project and discovered, in the gathering, to tell a coherent story. The prolific Welsh musician’s sixth solo album in just four years, Passing Craze seemed to take on a logic of its own, the lyrics telling their own tale of dreams and struggle and delusion and failure and the slow work of putting the pieces back together.
The genesis of Passing Craze is a genuinely charming story of creative serendipity. The album began as a final university project for Evan Collett, who produced it and who plays alongside Emlyn in the psychedelic garage rock band Rainyday Rainbow. Collett needed to make an album for his final project at DBS in Bristol, a university specializing in music production whose name stands for Deep Blue Sound, and he asked Emlyn if there was any unrecorded material that could become another album. This question prompted the unearthing of a few forgotten gems and fragments and songs from years ago, some dating back to Emlyn’s first songwriting as a teenager, and remarkably these disparate pieces seemed to fit together, feeling as though they had a thread running through them despite having been written across many years.
The recording process itself shaped the album’s character in significant ways. Recording began in an impressive room at DBS, with a hugely expensive analog desk, the tracks starting with skeletal acoustic guitar doubled in an Elliott Smith style before being embellished with drums and piano and electric guitar and harmonica. The Elliott Smith influence is significant, that artist having been a master of the intimate, doubled acoustic guitar sound that creates a particular kind of warm vulnerability, and Emlyn’s adoption of this approach gives Passing Craze its intimate foundation. The university’s restriction of recording to three-hour sessions created a rush to get parts done and made the process take longer than expected, but as Emlyn reflects, that constraint may have been a good thing in the end, the pressure perhaps focusing the work in productive ways.
After Collett finished his course, work resumed at home in Cardiff, and the project took on more of a bedroom pop sound with additional layers of guitar and vocals and trumpet and melodica, percussion by drummer Jack Patrick and backing vocals by Alys Hardy. Collett added interesting production flair throughout, including slide guitar and the playing of banjo with a violin bow, the experimental approach reflecting a desire to get interesting sounds and do things differently. This evolution from the analog-desk studio recordings to the home-recorded bedroom pop layers gives the album a rich and varied texture, the two phases of recording combining into a whole that is more interesting for having been made in different circumstances.
One of the most charming elements of the album’s creation is the rediscovery of Collett’s grandfather’s old Roland analog synth from the 1970s, which had been locked away in a storage unit. This monophonic synth, capable of playing only one note at a time, proved valuable precisely because of its limitation, encouraging the thinking of harmonic parts rather than the playing of chords, and it ended up being used on nearly every song, adding considerable character to the album’s sound. The experimental use of this synth is genuinely inventive, with experimental layers of guitar sent through its circuits, audible on Miss Understood, and morphed through a guitar pedal simulating VHS tape degradation, the resulting lo-fi sound heard on Your Dishes and Burning the Candle making it sound, as Emlyn puts it, like the synth was on fire. This kind of inventive sonic experimentation gives Passing Craze its distinctive lo-fi character.
The album opens with Starsick, a title that suggests a kind of cosmic longing or disorientation, the star-sickness being perhaps a yearning for something beyond reach or a dizziness in the face of the vast. Miss Understood follows with its clever play on words, the misunderstood and the Miss Understood being the same and different, the title capturing the theme of misunderstanding that recurs throughout the album. Goldfish Bowl brings the image of confinement and exposure, the goldfish bowl being a space of being trapped and watched simultaneously, while Burning the Candle evokes the burning of the candle at both ends, the exhaustion and the intensity of living too hard.
The title track Passing Craze sits at the heart of the album, the passing craze being the fad or obsession or madness that passes through, the temporary intensity that grips and then releases. This theme of the passing nature of crazes and obsessions connects to the album’s larger narrative of delusion and the putting back together of pieces, the recognition that the intense fixations that grip us are often temporary, that the craze passes. Your Dishes brings the domestic and the everyday into the album, the dishes being the mundane reality that persists beneath the dreams and struggles, while Shenandoah Rag offers a more playful, perhaps instrumental moment, the rag form connecting to older musical traditions.
Lost in a Dream #2 continues the album’s preoccupation with dreams and the dream state, the sequel designation suggesting a return to territory explored before, the lostness in dreams being part of the delusion that the album charts. The strikingly titled doyouseethesameshadeofblue, run together without spaces, captures something of the album’s experimental and poetic sensibility, the question of whether two people see the same shade of blue being a classic philosophical puzzle about the privacy of subjective experience, the impossibility of knowing whether others perceive as we do. A Series of Misunderstandings extends the misunderstanding theme that runs through the album, the series suggesting an accumulation of failures to connect and comprehend.
The Last World War brings a darker and more apocalyptic note, while Rarebit offers a distinctly Welsh reference, the Welsh rarebit being a beloved dish, the local specificity connecting to Emlyn’s broader project of mapping a Welsh landscape. The Great Welsh Novel continues this Welsh theme with a touch of humor and ambition, the great Welsh novel being the aspiration and perhaps the delusion of creating something definitively significant. And the album closes with When the Album’s Done, a self-referential conclusion that comments on its own completion, the meta-awareness of the album reflecting on its own ending providing a fitting and slightly playful conclusion to a record assembled from fragments into an unexpected whole.
Tom Emlyn’s broader artistic identity gives Passing Craze its deeper context. Described by BBC Radio Wales as a peripatetic musical genius, Emlyn crafts honest, swirling songs, tall tales laced with dark jokes and words that cut straight to the bone. His current solo work maps an alternative South Welsh landscape, a hallucinated community drawn from psychogeography and local history, the anthropological observations shaping poetic lyrics and simple 60s-folk-influenced melodies that explore what it means to belong to a place. This sense of place and belonging runs through Passing Craze, the Welsh references and the local specificity grounding the album’s more universal themes of dreams and struggle and delusion.
Emlyn’s remarkable productivity, five albums between 2022 and 2025 with several more written, has earned him the title of Wales’ most prolific musician from God Is In The TV, and Passing Craze continues this prolific output while demonstrating that the volume does not come at the expense of quality. The album’s range, delving into psychedelia and folk and jazz and blues and poetry and ambient music, reflects Emlyn’s prolifically wide-ranging sensibility, all brought together by his distinctive soulful harmonica and lyrical guitar and verbal dexterity and the warm, lo-fi production style that defines his work.
Passing Craze is the sound of forgotten fragments assembled into an unexpected whole, a narrative of dreams and struggle and delusion and the putting back together of pieces that emerged almost by accident from a university production project. Tom Emlyn has made an album that took on a logic of its own, the grandfather’s synth and the VHS degradation and the doubled acoustic guitars combining into a richly textured exploration of the particular peculiarity of human experience.
The craze passes, the pieces come back together, and the album gets done. Tom Emlyn has assembled something genuinely cohesive from the scattered gems of years, and Passing Craze lingers like the strange magic place from which its inspiration seemed to flow.
