Album Review: Decoding Birdsong — Antony Szmierek

Album Review: Decoding Birdsong — Antony Szmierek

Released August 21st 2026
EDM / Drum n Bass

Album Review: Decoding Birdsong — Antony Szmierek

There is something wonderfully contradictory about attempting to decode birdsong.

You can analyze the frequencies. Identify the species. Study the patterns. Determine whether a bird is warning others, attracting a mate or defending its territory. But somewhere along the way, if you become too concerned with understanding exactly what every sound means, you risk forgetting the simplest reason you stopped to listen in the first place:

It was beautiful.

That tension—between experiencing life and endlessly trying to understand it—sits at the heart of Antony Szmierek’s extraordinary second album, Decoding Birdsong.

Released August 21, 2026 through Mushroom Music, the thirteen-track album finds the Manchester-born poet, musician and producer expanding dramatically upon the spoken-word electronic style that brought him widespread attention. Szmierek’s formula initially sounds deceptively simple: poetry delivered conversationally over electronic music. But Decoding Birdsong demonstrates how limitless that idea can actually become.

Breakbeats collide with house. Disco meets UK garage. Techno rhythms dissolve into atmospheric synthesizers. Spoken poetry suddenly becomes singing before disappearing back into narration.

And somehow it all works.

Szmierek isn’t simply putting poetry over dance music. He understands that rhythm exists inside language itself. His sentences accelerate, pause and tumble across the beat, sometimes locking perfectly into the percussion and elsewhere deliberately fighting against it. The voice becomes another rhythmic instrument.

It’s spoken word you can dance to.

That approach has been developing for several years. Before music became his full-time career, Szmierek worked as an English teacher, including teaching young people with special educational needs. During the pandemic he began placing his poetry over music, eventually emerging from Manchester’s spoken-word scene with the Poems To Dance To EP. BBC Radio 6 Music named him its Artist of the Year in 2023, and his 2025 debut Service Station at the End of the Universe subsequently reached number one on the UK Dance Albums Chart. Since then have come Glastonbury, Later… with Jools Holland, sold-out shows and, in February 2026, a performance before roughly 20,000 people closing Solomun’s Alexandra Palace shows.

That sudden acceleration in his life provides important context for Decoding Birdsong.

This is fundamentally an album about what happens when the things you’ve been hoping for actually happen.

Success doesn’t necessarily eliminate doubt. Sometimes it gives you entirely new things to worry about.

The album begins brilliantly with “Chalk,” where something as mundane as chalking a snooker cue becomes a metaphor for control, preparation, chance and superstition. The electronic production gradually expands underneath Szmierek’s words, establishing one of the record’s recurring questions: how much control do we actually have over what happens to us? Szmierek has described coincidence almost as a personal religion, and throughout the album he continually notices tiny events and wonders whether they’re random occurrences or signals pointing somewhere larger.

Then comes “The Heron,” one of the album’s central symbols.

The bird becomes almost a spiritual messenger—not necessarily because it is one, but because Szmierek chooses to entertain the possibility. That’s the crucial difference. A chance encounter can remain meaningless or become profoundly important depending upon the person experiencing it.

The excellent “Bookie’s Favourite,” featuring Ellur, pushes further into questions of luck, belief and expectation. Ellur’s restrained delivery complements Szmierek beautifully, creating a dialogue between poetry and melody rather than simply dropping a guest vocalist onto an electronic track. It’s one of several moments demonstrating how much more collaborative this record is than its predecessor.

Then things get wonderfully strange.

“Godzilla Hotel,” featuring Bristol producer 1-800 GIRLS, transforms an experience in Japan into one of the album’s most memorable stories. A minimalist bass line and infectious breakbeat provide the foundation while Szmierek recounts the accidental unraveling of a relationship against imagery involving shrines, disappointment and a giant fibreglass Godzilla. Critics have repeatedly singled the song out, with Beats Per Minute highlighting both its infectious beat and the emotional rawness of the storytelling.

It shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does.

But that’s Szmierek’s gift.

He can take something absurdly specific and somehow uncover something universal inside it.

“Seminal” continues the album’s balance between introspection and movement. Bright two-step rhythms and swirling electronic textures contrast with ideas of emotional stagnation and isolation. It is also an excellent demonstration of Szmierek’s growing confidence as a singer, rather than exclusively a spoken-word performer. Several reviews have noticed that development, particularly how much more frequently he allows melodic vocals to coexist with his familiar conversational delivery.

That expansion continues with “Flight Simulator,” featuring Imogen and the Knife. Anxiety and uncertainty are transformed into something unexpectedly euphoric, with Imogen’s ethereal vocals moving through the electronic arrangement almost like another synthesizer. The contrast is striking: emotionally uneasy subject matter surrounded by music that makes your body want to move.

That’s Decoding Birdsong in miniature.

Sad thoughts.

Beautiful synthesizers.

Keep dancing.

“Dave’s Angling Superstore,” featuring longtime collaborator MAX RAD, might have the most wonderfully ordinary title on the record. Yet underneath that deliberately mundane exterior sits some serious electronic firepower. Reviews have pointed to its old-school drum & bass influence and substantial drop, and it demonstrates particularly well why describing Szmierek merely as “spoken word over house music” undersells what’s happening here.

The production throughout Decoding Birdsong is constantly shifting.

House.

Electro.

Disco.

Garage.

Breakbeat.

Drum & bass.

Techno.

None of those genres completely defines the album because they’re being used as different emotional languages.

“The First Five Minutes of Magnolia,” featuring Australian producer Pretty Girl, takes another turn toward hazy, emotionally charged electronic music. Even the title reflects Szmierek’s fascination with tiny fragments of experience. Five minutes of a film can become significant. A bird beside a canal can become significant. A snooker cue can become significant.

Everything potentially means something.

And that’s precisely where the album begins questioning itself.

“The Same Heron Again” brings its central symbol back into view. Is seeing the bird again meaningful?

Or is it simply…

the same heron again?

That uncertainty is the entire point.

When you begin looking for patterns, patterns appear everywhere.

“Commune” continues the record’s increasingly reflective second half before “You’re Not Supposed To Do This Forever” introduces perhaps one of the album’s most quietly devastating ideas. Behind all the career momentum, touring, attention and endless movement sits the awareness that no period of life lasts indefinitely.

Success is temporary.

Failure is temporary.

Relationships change.

Cities change.

People move.

Birds fly away.

The dance floor eventually empties.

That brings us to “Decoding Birdsong,” where the album finally begins answering the question it has spent nearly its entire running time asking.

Maybe everything doesn’t need decoding.

Maybe some experiences become less beautiful when we insist upon explaining them.

Maybe the bird doesn’t need to be delivering a message from the universe.

Maybe listening is enough.

Szmierek has spoken directly about this concept in interviews, explaining that birds, songs, memories and coincidences began functioning as signs during a period when his life suddenly seemed extraordinarily lucky. He relocated from Manchester to Bristol amid this transformation, and the album became partly an attempt to understand the consequences of that luck.

Finally, “Aussie Gold Hunters” brings everything home.

The wonderfully ridiculous title refers to the Australian reality television series, but the song itself becomes one of the album’s most reflective moments. Wistful piano replaces some of the earlier dance-floor momentum while Szmierek considers impermanence, sleepless thoughts and the strange narratives our minds construct late at night.

Then the circle closes.

The album that began with snooker imagery ends with the sound of snooker balls.

The game continues.

Maybe skill determines what happens next.

Maybe luck does.

Maybe both.

Maybe neither.

And perhaps trying to solve that question is missing the point.

That’s why Decoding Birdsong works so beautifully as an album rather than merely a collection of electronic tracks. There is a genuine conceptual arc underneath all those breakbeats and synthesizers.

Other reviewers have recognized that evolution. DJ Mag described the record as showing a new level of sonic maturity, particularly noting its combination of spoken word, lush instrumentation and dance rhythms. Reading Indie Life emphasized how much more confident and stylistically varied the second album feels, while HIVE praised the way its production elevates Szmierek’s poetry beyond simply placing words over beats.

Those assessments make sense.

The obvious historical comparison remains Mike Skinner and The Streets, while Szmierek has also frequently been compared with Jarvis Cocker and John Cooper Clarke. But Decoding Birdsong increasingly suggests those comparisons are becoming less necessary.

Antony Szmierek sounds like Antony Szmierek.

And that’s a significant achievement.

The electronic side of the record deserves particular praise. Influences such as Caribou, Four Tet, LCD Soundsystem and Barry Can’t Swim can occasionally be detected in its DNA, but they’re reference points rather than templates. The production is bright when it needs optimism, fractured when the words become anxious, euphoric when something needs releasing and restrained when Szmierek needs us to listen.

Most importantly, the beats never overwhelm the poetry and the poetry never suffocates the beats.

They coexist.

That’s harder to accomplish than it sounds.

Electronic music traditionally asks listeners to surrender themselves physically—to stop thinking and move.

Poetry traditionally asks the opposite—to stop moving and think.

Decoding Birdsong asks you to do both.

Dance while considering loneliness.

Laugh while contemplating failure.

Listen to somebody talk about Godzilla while unexpectedly thinking about your own relationships.

Find existential significance in a fishing shop.

Watch a heron.

Wonder if it’s a sign.

Then laugh at yourself for wondering.

And keep dancing.

Perhaps that’s ultimately why this album feels so alive. Decoding Birdsong isn’t trying to provide answers. It’s documenting a human being noticing the world around him and wondering whether any of it makes sense.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

And sometimes a bird is simply singing.

You don’t have to understand the song.

You just have to hear it.

You can listen to the album here, on Spotify: