When you’re a solo artist rather than a band, you miss out on one of the finest traditions in music: splitting up, waiting a few years and lucratively reforming. The returning original line-up of the Sugababes received an ecstatic reception at Glastonbury last weekend, but Paolo Nutini can’t exactly announce that he’s finally resolved his differences with himself and realised it’s all about the tunes, man.
Yet it seems like something along those lines has happened. It’s over eight years since the Scotsman’s last album, Caustic Love, and before this year his most recent live appearances were a handful of South American dates in 2017. Did he stop altogether? Was it writer’s block? Relationship issues? “I could not seem to find a way out of my worried mind/Feeling I’d been left behind was bringing me down,” he sings on Lose It. On Acid Eyes, someone he likes appears to have moved to Mexico.
