PREP Share New Album 'The Programme'

London-based four-piece PREP have released their new album 'The Programme' via Bright Antenna Records. This album is the sound of PREP, shut away in a 1970s disco studio in Paris, channeling all the emotion and spirit of a year’s writing through the legendary groove filter of French producer Renaud Letang (Feist, L'impératrice, and Benny Sings).

Fans can listen to 'The Programme' here: ffm.to/TheProgramme

'The Programme' is PREP at its most confident, showing off its sparkling taste through bold features and a bigger, near-anthemic sound—the result of playing bigger and bigger venues around the world. "The songs are about looking for connection, finding it, and losing it," the band explain. "Sonically, some of it goes to more epic places than we’ve been previously; some of it’s more introspective and intimate. We threw things open and collaborated more than we ever have before - in Europe, the US and Asia - but it feels like we’ve ended up with a record that, beyond anything we’ve done, sounds like the four of us, playing in a room together."

On the lead single "Close As We Get (feat Vicky Farewell)", PREP shares, "When we got in the studio with Vicky Farewell, the first thing she started playing was this beautiful cascade of piano - clearly flowing out of 90s ballad territory somewhere upstream, but distilled into something more restrained and introspective.

"At the heart of the song are the thoughts you can find yourself having about someone you’re with, and the other lives they might be imagining for themselves. Wanting to know, for the sake of closeness, but also being scared to look."

PREP has just wrapped up a successful 2024 Asia run where they played shows across the region in cities including Bangkok, Taipei, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, and Manila. They previously toured Asia in 2023 where they played at VERY Festival in Thailand before heading to China for a string of headline shows and finished off the run with Clockenflap in Hong Kong.

The band have over 570,000 monthly listeners and subscribers from Southeast Asia alone, and the band hallmarks their time building their fanbase in Asia as an important pivot where PREP’s sense of sonic possibility expanded.

The members of PREP—vocalist-lyricist Tom Havelock, keyboardist Llywelyn ap Myrddin, drummer Guillaume Jambel, and producer-guitarist Dan Radclyffe—began writing 'The Programme' in London in 2023. Though the group initially started with the intention of exploring the world of ‘70s and ‘80s American R&B and soft rock through a contemporary lens, in the ensuing years PREP honed a sound that was unmistakably theirs. The formation of this singular style allowed them to cover Harry Styles’s smash hit “As It Was” and make it sound like PREP. (Tens of millions of plays and YouTube comments like “this makes Harry's version sound like a cover” can’t be wrong.) Now, they decided, it was time to step out of the comfortable sandbox they’d built.

The result of the band's judicious collaboration with Renaud is a timeless record with cosmopolitan flair. Its many guests—cult musician Eddie Chacon, Thai star Phum Viphurit, dreamy LA singer-songwriter Vicky Farewell, and Montreal keyboardist Anomalie—capture the band’s expansive sensibility.

Though it’s only PREP’s sophomore album, 'The Programme' feels like a capstone to a musical project that began as an experiment and grew into a globetrotting phenomenon with a fully realized aesthetic. The evolution is clear—an epic song like “Last Plane Out”, with its stadium-sized, Phil Collins-esque sense of scale, would not have made sense on previous PREP releases. This is the moment where PREP ascends to the next level of international acclaim.

'The Programme' Tracklisting:
1. Infinity Pool
2. Call It feat Eddie Chacon
3. Getaway feat Phum Viphurit
4. Open Up
5. One Track Life
6. Only Love
7. Close As We Get feat Vicky Farewell
8. Situation
9. Last Plane Out
10. The Programme