Mark William Lewis’s introspective music is making a lot of noise

Having crafted his tender sound in South London, the poetic songwriter is heading on an international tour with the backing of A24’s new record label.
Music
Words: James Balmont
Photography: Steve Gullick
I’m waiting outside the bolted door of London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts when I spot Mark William Lewis strolling towards me.
Draped in black streetwear, a sharp Roman nose guiding his shaved head, Lewis cuts an intense and almost haunting figure as he traipses The Mall, a ceremonial road best known for its royal processions. Lewis is one of London’s most beguiling contemporary songwriters, whose soul-wrecking single Tomorrow Is Perfect recently marked his unlikely signing to A24 (yes, that A24) Music. The ICA, which hosted Lewis’s recent headline show, felt like a sophisticated setting for our interview. But it’s closed.
“Walk in the park instead?” I offer sheepishly, as the sun shines overhead. “I might like to go inside…” he murmurs.
Our stroll over to The Harp, a suitably quiet-ish pub in Covent Garden, gives me time to reflect on Lewis’s path up until this point. I’d first discovered his music in fittingly intimate circumstances in 2022. His alluringly subdued debut EP Pleasure Is Everything — a collection of dusky meanderings which brought to mind The Durutti Column and Arthur Russell — had worked its way onto an ambient music playlist I regularly monged out to on Spotify, and I’d been spellbound by its brooding melancholy. In the years since, Lewis had self-released his debut album Living, collaborated with NYC rapper MIKE, and popped up on scene-defining compilations by underground labels such as Scenic Route and section1 while maintaining a near-imperceptible social media presence. As Lewis reveals himself in the flesh, it becomes clear that he’s been on quite a journey himself.
Speaking in a rumbling baritone that serves as a constant, ASMR-like distraction, Lewis tells me that he was raised on a diet of poetry and literature growing up in Stamford Hill: Eliot, Joyce, Ginsberg, and “the kind of magical realist stuff that felt like you could go into another world while still being grounded”. (He cites Gabriel García Márquez, whose work often casually wove supernatural events into everyday scenarios in Latin America.) His dad is a writer, and he dedicated a book about metaphor and language to him shortly after his birth. And so by the time Lewis journeyed South of the river to study art at Goldsmiths in 2012, “the fabric of my wanting to be creative” was already well woven. During his studies, Lewis was known to “write really long poems and shout them” inside art installations and galleries with his noise band, Bad Food.
“All my favourite songwriters’ best qualities are their abilities to reckon with themselves. I knew I was going to be touring a lot, and so I felt that night after night I should believe in what I’m saying”
But it was on the 18th floor of a 20-storey tower block in neighbouring Deptford that he became the Mark William Lewis we know today today, writing pensive guitar music while staring out at the murky Canary Wharf skyline – a recurring image throughout his canon. “The first EP’s cover is just the view from my bedroom window,” he tells me, sipping on a Coke as the sun brightens his face through the pub window. “And the Tomorrow is Perfect video is where I go on walks to skim stones when I’m trying to clear my head. I find myself drawn to environments that have a cinematic quality. When I’m making music in my room, it’s the setting that brings all the themes together.” Lewis says he’s drawn to London’s magical realist dimension, the “beaches, rivers, weird uncanny sculptures… The city has horizons that you don’t necessarily always see.”
He talks about the cultural touchpoints that have kept him in Deptford for so long, like the illegal Thames beach parties playing “genres that I don’t even know what they’re called”, and the cluster of DIY venues that have marked out a new South London music nucleus along the Surrey Canal Road, such as M.O.T., Ormside Projects, and Avalon Cafe. “That’s been the scene for a little while,” he says, before popping down to the bar to grab a drink. The irony is lost on neither of us when he unconsciously returns with a pint of London Pride in his hand.

“For years, at those venues, it would be all smoke, reverb, and someone mumbling behind the decks. After COVID, I guess I was part of a group of artists who were a bit more front-facing with vocals, lyrics and performance, like Bar Italia [Lewis has collaborated with the band’s singer Nina Cristante], Double Virgo and Still House Plants. I think people really wanted that in that scene — something a bit more clear, more brave and direct.”
Still, Lewis took some time finding his voice. Early releases are just as marked by restrained instrumentals as they are the deep and soulful mutterings that would later define his more recent music. The harmonicas that frequently wheeze their way into his sound were originally “just a way of accompanying myself,” he says. But those weary, metallic harmonica sighs are also “when I can really let rip – I feel like I’m screaming, or yelling.” The guitar, meanwhile, is the bedrock against which all his introspection is stacked. “It’s something as personal as the voice,” he says. When he’s not delicately plucking at his wounds à la the great Mancunian guitarist Vini Reilly, he evokes beloved figures like Elliott Smith (like on the song Seventeen). “Sometimes I think he’s the best songwriter of all time,” Lewis says. “He’s brave and bold, and also poetic with the way he looks at what he’s been through.”

Mark William Lewis’s self-titled album – which is being released by A24 Music on 12th September – is about self-discovery, human connection and disconnection, and the messiness of social scenes and going out. These themes are underlined as much in refrains about moving “through the swollen city on a downer” (Tomorrow is Perfect) as they are on songs like trumpet-and-vibraslap bop Still Above — a song about “having an argument with your partner when you’re hungover and trying to piece it together.”
“The lyrics come out because they’re honest,” Lewis says. “All my favourite songwriters’ best qualities are their abilities to reckon with themselves, and that became a qualifying thing — I knew I was going to be touring a lot, and so I felt that night after night I should believe in what I’m saying and know that at least, at one time, I meant it.”
In any case, Lewis’ earnest reflections on contemporary London living are no longer Deptford’s humble secret. Through associations with tastemakers like Scenic Route (who manage him), and experimental Danish songwriters like Astrid Sonne and Fine, (who he appeared alongside on Scenic Route’s Road Less Travelled, Vol. 2 compilation), Lewis now feels more part of a global scene of forward-thinking contemporary music than merely a local one. “My peers now are Chanel Beads and Nourished By Time,” he agrees.
“A24 completely let me do what I want. It feels really fresh and exciting [in a way that] signing with a classic indie label that imposes its own context perhaps doesn’t”
And as the first artist signed ‘proper’ to the record label branch of arthouse movie goliaths A24, there’s a palpable international trajectory to his creativity going forward. Since 2021, A24 Music has existed primarily as a vehicle for the production company to release soundtracks and scores by the likes of Alex G (I Saw the TV Glow), Grizzly Bear (Past Lives) and The National’s Bryce Dessner (Sing Sing). But A24’s record deal with Lewis – independent of any motion picture production – signals exciting new ambitions for the label, while Lewis’ expansion into the US market has been made immediately evident via the announcement of an extensive Stateside tour this Autumn.
“I wasn’t really aware of the cultural niche they’d carved out,” he says of the indie studio powerhouse responsible for contemporary classics like Uncut Gems, Moonlight and Hereditary. “In fact, I hadn’t even heard of A24 before [they expressed their interest]. Maybe the algorithm blessed me,” he jokes. “But it felt really fresh and exciting, and the more I learned about their identity, the more I could relate to the aesthetic and genre similarities — horror; indie. It felt like a good match.”
But after his manager heard that they were considering starting a music label proper, and Lewis shared his unreleased album recordings with them, he was heartened by A24’s decisiveness. At a time when other labels were stringing him along, “they wanted to do it straight away,” he says. “And they completely let me do what I want”… It [feels] really fresh and exciting [in a way that] signing with a classic indie label that imposes its own context perhaps doesn’t.”
Whatever the case, A24’s industry-disrupting ethos could be conducive to Lewis’ cinematic and sentimental reflections on London life. And with Mark William Lewis, his introspections are laid bare for all to see — be it from the banks of the Thames, the skyscrapers of London Bridge, or from some far-off vantage across the Atlantic.
