London-based producer, singer/songwriter and Puma Blue creative mastermind Jacob Allen will be releasing his sixth studio album, Croak Dreams through Play It Again Sam on February 6, 2026.
Recorded straight to tape at Peter Gabriel‘s Real World Studios, Croak Dream reportedly sees Allen and co-producer and mixer Sam Petts-Davies expanding the project’s sonic world, channeling the project’s sultry, emotional and conceptual complexity with an instinct-led take on experimenting with Allen’s art to find its most evocative form.
Additionally, longtime collaborator Harvey Grant contributed to the textual quality and identity of the album. “Later at Real World Studios, the band and I recorded tape loops over a small fragment of the demo, none of them heard the finished song, and when Sam and I came back to London we cut those improvisations into this Frankenstein’s monster type collage,” Allen says. “We were really leaning into a mutual love for CAN, Aphex Twin and Queens of the Stone Age.”
Croak Dream‘s latest single, album title track “Croak Dream” is a broodingly cinematic and uneasy track that features Allen’s remarkably Thom Yorke-like falsetto croon singing over a hypnotic arrangement of angular, whirring instrumentation paired with industrial-meets-dub-like beats. Seemingly drawing from Bristol-era trip hop — i.e., Portishead, Massive Attack, etc. — and dub with an alt-pop sensibility, “Croak Dream” thematically focuses on an age-old philosophical question: “If you knew how and when you were going to die, how would it change how you decided to live?”
“A Croak Dream is a prophetic dream where you see a vision of how you die. Half the songs on this record allude to how you might decide to live, act, if you somehow knew your awaiting fate. Being daring, romantic… saying what you really mean.” Allen explains.
“‘Croak Dream’ is about someone I have dreamt of for years. Nightmares really, I just have not been able to shake them yet,” he continues. “I thought maybe what I needed was a sort of exorcism, so I wrote this song unpacking this strange bond that has haunted me, and then put it to bed, or death, at the end. It is a laying of a ghost to rest, I hope.”
Directed and edited by Allen and featuring animation by Quill, the accompanying video for “Croak Dream” further emphasizes the song’s surrealistic, dream-like logic, featuring Allen and his live bandmates in a PlayStation-inspired video game universe, traversing their individual subconscious in eerie, dream-meets-video game-like adventures.
“I wanted the video to evoke boyhood and be in conversation with the lyrics. The basic idea was to create a PlayStation style game paying homage to RHCP’s ‘Californication’ video, but in a way that carried deep meaning for the band,” Allen says of the video. “I searched high and low for the right person who could capture the nostalgia of games like Silent Hill, Tomb Raider and Pro Skater until I found Quill (@grabmypepsi). I wrote him a script, and he animated it all from scratch. Then it got run through VHS right at the end so that it felt truly like it would if you were playing it in the late 90’s. It felt like a way to honor these friends and, in a strange way, the children we were back then.”
The prolific British artist and his live band will be embarking on a month-long North American tour that includes a March 7, 2026 stop at Irving Plaza. Check out the rest of the tour dates below.
Tour Dates
February 12 – Numbers – Houston, TX
February 13 – Granada Theater – Dallas, TX
February 14 – Paper Tiger – San Antonio, TX
February 16 – Lowbrow Palace – El Paso, TX
February 17 – Crescent Ballroom – Phoenix, AZ
February 18 – Music Box – San Diego, CA
February 20 – The Belasco – Los Angeles, CA
February 21 – August Hall – San Francisco, CA
February 23 – Wonder Ballroom – Portland, OR
February 24 – Crocodile – Seattle, WA
February 27 – Amsterdam – St Paul, MN
February 28 – Outset – Chicago, IL
March 3 – Lee’s Palace – Toronto, ON
March 4 – Théâtre Fairmount – Montreal, QC
March 6 – Crystal Ballroom – Somerville, MA
March 7 – Irving Plaza – New York, NY
March 10 – Black Cat – Washington, DC
March 11 – Cat’s Cradle – Carrboro, NC
March 12 – The Masquerade (Hell) – Atlanta, GA
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