Well, after too many days, too many months and years, Monochrome has been released today, in the last few minutes in fact.

I’m happy with it and the key thing that has taken it this long to have been released is that I had to be sure in myself that it was as good as I could get it to be before letting it out of the door to play nicely with all the rest of the music that is released every day all over the world.

As usual, it has been released primarily on Soundcloud where I have a Pro account and can be found at the following location:

https://soundcloud.com/steven-mccarthy-hunt/sets/monochrome

As ever, its never been about money and it never ever will be. I never expect anyone to pay for my art. This is my passion, this is what I do and these songs are my musical legacy and the story of my life and loves over the last 20 years. I share them because I believe in them and because they say who I am and what I am. I hope you like them and can see the evolution in both the material and how they have been recorded and produced as I have learned more about what it takes to record and release a record these days.

I may also release it through Bandcamp, but I’ve not made that decision yet. The main release site was always going to be Soundcloud, it has been the one place where I have always released and shared any work that I have done, whether it be my own compositions, or whether it has been collaborations with my dear friends and former bandmates, or production work that I may have done for others.

Monochrome has had a somewhat long and some may say tortuous gestation period; I used to wryly joke that even Tears For Fears didnt take as long releasing albums as this. Perhaps, given that there was a very long time between Everybody Loves A Happy Ending in 2004 and when The Tipping Point was released in 2022, that doesnt quite ring true anymore, LOLZ. But nonetheless, most of the songs were written between 2012 and 2017 and ever since the release of No Expectations, back in 2017, I’ve been working on this EP, fitting it around normal daily life and progress has often been millimetric. And, I had hoped originally to release Mondegreen on the same day, in the same way that I did 8 years ago with London Road. Due to the big changes coming up of retirement from the Day Job and moving house and building a new studio, unfortunately that isnt going to be possible yet.

It is unlikely that I will get to work on Mondegreen much before October 2025 and the material is in nothing like the advanced state that Monochrome was and is and will need rolling in an awful lot more glitter before it gets let out of the door, like a housecat that has been locked up indoors for too long, LOLZ. Its not quite ready to zoom out of the door and roll around in the dust, purring, just yet…. (surely its not just our cat that does that?)

Anyway, I can feel myself digressing again already. I am also likely to be working on the next KOAS project which will go under the working title of Time Demands (Lord alone knows when that’ll be ready, LOLZ) and there are a lot of influences and different directions that can take.

I can promise that it wont be full of AI versions (I may release a separate collection purely of Suno-generated cuts at some point in the future, just to show what is possible with this kind of work). Suno is a part of my songwriting journey at the moment though and Time Demands is likely to be some years away yet, so lets see where the journey takes us. AI may or may not be partially involved if at all. Too early to say.

In the meantime… I hope you like Monochrome… I made it as good as I could, It tells the stories that I want it to and… its another chapter in the KOAS book.

Heres to the next one and I’ll be in touch soon.

Much love to all.