Palace’s fifth studio album, Ox, is a record preoccupied with the strange temporal dislocation of fatherhood; the experience of standing simultaneously at the beginning of someone else’s life and at the far end of one’s own childhood. Released through the band’s independent label, Palace Presents, Ox is less a conventional collection of songs than a storybook of memory, parenthood and impermanence. Its pages are filled by the ghosts of youth, the anxieties of growing older and the quiet wonders of beginning again.
Where Palace’s 2024 album Ultrasound frequently embraced abrasion and weight, Ox retreats into something more celestial. Palace trades the grit and melancholy of their previous record for a dreamlike soundscape where guitars float rather than strike, vocals dissolve into reverb, and melodies exist just beyond reach. Ox rarely plants its feet firmly on the ground, instead drifting between memory and the present, and suspended in the space between who we were and who we are becoming.
‘Dream On’ provides the album’s entrance into this world. A cavernous bassline establishes an uneasy foundation beneath Rupert Turner’s familiar, fleeting guitar melodies, while distant, siren-like synths orbit the composition. The song possesses a peculiar duality: its instrumentation threatens to become ominous, yet Leo Wyndham’s vocals remain remarkably serene, his softness serving as a lantern through the track’s darker corridors.
The song’s emotional centre lies in its confrontation with childhood; as each member of Palace experiences fatherhood for the first time, ‘Dream On’ considers the peculiar realisation that accompanies becoming a parent. In watching a child who begins to discover the world, the adult is inevitably confronted with the world they have already left behind. ‘It comes so quickly, and I’m older now’ distils this anxiety into a simple admission, while ‘You could be something, dream on’ speaks simultaneously to child and parent. The song therefore becomes less a celebration of growing up than a metaphor for the freedom that growing up gradually erodes.
The album’s second single ‘Kid’ approaches fatherhood from another angle. On this track, parenthood is experienced not through reflection but through absence. Written from the perspective of a touring musician longing for home, Wyndham sings, ‘I count the days till I will see you,’ his voice suspended over a trilling tambourine and rolling fingerpicked guitar. The arrangement recalls the warmth of Palace’s earliest work, but there is a greater emotional distance embedded within it. The guitar moves forward while the narrator remains elsewhere, making the song’s longing feel almost physical.
Yet Ox occasionally finds itself trapped by the familiarity of its own introduction. Palace released the album’s first three tracks as singles, and the record begins with material already known to its listeners. While these songs establish Ox’s emotional narrative effectively, their consecutive placement diminishes the sense of discovery that an album can offer. By the time ‘Denny’s’ arrives, much of the record’s initial atmosphere has already been established.
This is unfortunate as ‘Denny’s’ possesses the qualities of a song that might have functioned more effectively as an unexpected doorway into the album. Its melody is gentle and tender, retaining the record’s prevailing warmth, but it lacks the immediate gravitational pull of ‘Dream On’. Placed after three familiar tracks, its softness feels less like an invitation and more a continuation of a conversation already underway. The issue is not the song itself, but the architecture surrounding it. In short, Ox sometimes sacrifices momentum in favour of familiarity, which can’t be said for Palace’s earlier works.
‘I’ve Been Laughing’ is where Palace’s relationship with nostalgia becomes particularly vivid. The track recalls the atmospheric intimacy of So Long Forever and Life After, but it does so without attempting to imitate the past. Its layered instrumentation is deceptively restrained, with a delicate guitar slide moving through the song as though a light beam piercing through clouds. Chords bleed seamlessly into one another, creating a carefree track without edges or borders. The track exists outside ordinary time, offering solitude not as loneliness but as refuge.
If ‘I’ve Been Laughing’ floats, ‘Brown Bread’ descends slowly into something more expansive. At just under seven minutes, it is Ox’s great atmospheric undertaking, allowing Palace sufficient space to let the record’s emotional architecture unfold. Guitar chords accumulate gradually, piano cascades beneath them, and Wyndham’s vocals stretch towards yearning and sincerity. Rather than rushing towards a climax, the song widens around the listener, its layers accumulating like sediment.
At its core, ‘Brown Bread’ is concerned with freedom. Lyrics like ‘Godspeed, farewell’ and ‘Release me’ suggest an attempt to loosen oneself from history’s grip. The song consequently feels like a threshold; one foot remains planted in the past while the other reaches towards an uncertain future. The track’s length becomes essential to this feeling, granting the band the time to step free and begin this new chapter. Palace does not announce transformation but allows it to happen slowly until the listener realises they have finally arrived somewhere different.
The album’s title track brings this journey to its conclusion. ‘Ox’ is restless in its construction, moving through shifts in tempo and key as though refusing to settle into a single emotional register. It recalls the atmospheric expansiveness of Shoals, but with a stronger sense of resolution. Reverb and echo exceed the limitations of instrumentation, while Matt Hodges on drums provide a consistent pulse beneath the song’s otherwise weightless arrangement.
As the track gradually disappears, so too does the world Palace have constructed across the record. What remains is the album’s central theme, the desire to preserve the past while accepting that it cannot remain untouched. Ox understands nostalgia as an attempt to negotiate with time. Childhood and youth can be remembered, but never inhabited again.
Palace’s greatest achievement on Ox is therefore not its individual moments of beauty, but the atmosphere that connects them. The band’s cinematic approach to songwriting gives the album the scale of something much larger than its intimate subject matter, turning the private experience of fatherhood into an understanding of the universal passage of time.
Palace looks backwards to understand what lies ahead, finding in fatherhood a strange route back to childhood. The album closes not with a definitive resolution, but with the feeling of a storybook being gently shut, the final page turned, and the memories still glowing between its covers.
Palace: Ox – Released 18 September 2026 (Palace Presents/AWAL)
