Daniel Johns: FutureNever review – brilliant songs on a choppy album

‘It is unassailable, ambitious, and often brilliant, with the album’s high points sitting among his very best work’ … Daniel Johns. Photograph: Luke Eblen

“I won’t be leading in with singles,” Daniel Johns declared when announcing FutureNever, his second solo release. “The album is designed to be enjoyed as an album.”

It’s a romantic notion, in a world where playlists are populated by robots, but the album’s cyberpunk artwork and dystopian title meshes nicely with Johns’ conceptual thesis: “‘FutureNever’ is a place where your past, present and future collide – in the ‘FutureNever’ the quantum of your past experiences become your superpower.”