Tag: Puma Blue

Video by William Ruben Helms

New Video: Puma Blue Shares Surrealistic, Dream-like Visual for “Croak Dream”

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.”

Single Review by William Ruben Helms

Emerging Barcelona-born singer/songwriter and musician Uma is the daughter of a British-born performance artist, who studied art and at Farnham and moved to Spain in 1987. Along with her work as a performance artist, Uma’s mother Denys has been organizing festivals since the emerging Barcelona-born and-based was a little girl. Uma’s father Tew was born in Bangkok to a diplomatic family. He studied economics at Cambridge and eventually returned to Bangkok, where he worked for a non profit hospice and orphanage that took care of those suffering from HIV. — He also taught tai chi course on the side.

Because of her parents’ work, Uma grew up traveling and spending lengthy periods of time in different countries, including Thailand, Greenland and Canada.

Uma received classical violin training when she was four. Along with a musical upbringing that included Joni Mitchell, Buika, Nico, and Ella Fitzgerald, the Spanish-born artist credits her experience traveling and growing up around several different cultures as informing much of her work.

She emerged into the scene in 2020: She collaborated with her partner Salpa on 2020’s “Bring Me The Mountain” double A side. She also has released two EPs, 2020’s debut EP Bel-li and last year’s The Moth & The Dove, which received attention from media outlets like Clash Magazine, Loud & Quiet, The Needle Drop, DIY Magazine, The Line of Best Fit, and Gigwise. She also released two stand-alone singles “Maybe We’ll Wake Up” and a new version of “Nebula” with London‘s Amy May Ellis.

2022 has been busy for the Spanish-born artist: She started the year touring with rising artist Puma Blue. Building upon that momentum, she released “Crocodile,” an atmospheric and swaggering banger that draws from Spanish flamenco guitar, jazz and contemporary pop.

Her latest single, the brooding and breathtakingly gorgeous “Granada” is sonically is one-part dreamy Nick Drake-like psych folk, one-part confessional, troubadour pop centered around strummed, acoustic guitar, Uma’s achingly tender delivery, bursts of atmospheric synths and reverb-drenched percussion. At its core, “Granada” is a swooning, old-fashioned love song that captures the longing, the sick ache, the uneasiness and joy of love.

Interestingly, the song mirrors Uma’s own love story with that of her mother’s.  “’Granada’ is the sound of the Underworld, a moody ode to the places we go in love”, Uma explains.

“In a way”, Uma adds, “’Granada’ is as much about their love story as my own, a moment in time where you have nothing left to do but surrender to the journey you are on.”

The album artwork is a photograph of Uma’s mother Denys, in her 20s, taken by a friend around the time that her parents met.