Over 50 years into his career, David Byrne could be taking it easy. He could rest on his laurels, push out a simple album with no bells or whistles, and no one would bat an eye. 

When you spend over a decade as the frontman of a band as creatively influential as Talking Heads, then spend the next several decades making some of the weirdest and most fun art-pop albums in collaboration with a wide variety of artists, no one could blame you for taking things easy. But David Byrne doesn’t do that.

While his latest album, ‘Who Is The Sky?’ may technically only be his ninth solo album, that would be to ignore his collaborative works with the likes of Brian Eno, St. Vincent, and Fatboy Slim. It’s also arguable if this record counts as a proper solo album as the ensemble Ghost Train Orchestra are also credited on the album. The group is responsible for the many orchestral flourishes that appear across the runtime, but if you believe that an orchestra is the only addition to the David Byrne formula on this album, you are sorely mistaken.

On his first album since 2018’s ‘American Utopia’, Byrne once again takes every opportunity to get weird. Across its 37 minutes, ‘Who Is The Sky?’ takes left-turn after left-turn as Byrne proves he’s just as goofy and fun as always. On a song like ‘When We Are Singing’, for example, Byrne and his crew deliver a tight piece of orchestral pop over a driving drum break that, while great, could potentially be labelled conventional. When we reach the outro however, Byrne starts mimicking a guitar solo with his voice, sounding like a cat that's had its tail run over and run through autotune. It’s a bizarre and wild moment that encapsulates some of the best moments on the album.

Elsewhere, on the outro to “I’m An Outsider”, A vocoder suddenly doubles-up Byrne’s voice, making for a surprising and interesting musical moment. The album is full of little sections like this, where Byrne experiments with classic pop tropes of the 90’s and 2000’s with a very 2020’s style of production courtesy of Kid Harpoon, who also worked on Miley Cyrus’s ‘Something Beautiful’ earlier this year. There are a few songs that also act as experiments in and of themself, like the suitably titled ‘The Avant Garde’, which swaps between dissonant verses and triumphant pop hooks on a dime, or closer ‘The Truth’, which sees Byrne delve headfirst into a modern reggaetón style. Byrne has described the process of writing songs as “a new adventure”, and that ethos can be heard in his approach to the songs on this album.

Lyrically, the album focuses on everyday life, but where some would see mundanity in the topics that Byrne writes about, he sees beauty and absurdity. A song like ‘My Apartment Is My Friend’ describes the deep emotional connection that someone can have to their home. On ‘She Explains Things To Me’, Byrne sings about a figure in his life (possibly his partner Mala Gaonkar whom he told The New York Times he would be marrying the week that the album released) that guides him through the everyday through the lens of explaining film characters and poetry to him. Byrne takes concepts that may have become standard and boring to the average person and transforms them into musical journeys.

There are plenty of other great moments across the album, including a feature from Paramore vocalist Hayley Williams on ‘What Is The Reason For It?’, that showcase Byrne’s unwavering confidence in the realm of art-pop songwriting all these years into his career. If ‘Who Is The Sky’ is an indicator of just how daring Byrne is still capable of being at this point in life, we can only hope that he continues releasing records of this quality for the foreseeable future.