Ashley Ray Simon lets instinct take the lead on new single 'Strange Animals'

Ashley Ray Simon's 'Strange Animals' is a song caught before anyone had the chance to make it behave. The British artist, now based in Portugal, has spent his recent releases moving steadily away from neat categorisation, but this title-track from his forthcoming album pushes that instinct even further. Throughout this new offering, he leans into loose rhythm, first-take energy and the strange chemistry that appears when musicians stop trying to control every detail.

'Strange Animals' began as an uninterrupted improvisation between the artist on guitar and producer Moses van den Bogaerde working with an unquantised DrumBrute. The foundation was left deliberately imperfect, allowing the rhythm to drift and breathe instead of snapping into a rigid grid.

Then the frontman picked up a microphone with a book of Byron in hand, and let melody and words emerge almost entirely in one pass. Around 95% of the finished performance reportedly comes from that original take, and that lack of correction fits the wider philosophy beautifully.

Lyrically, the song circles the opposing forces within people: grace and destruction, thought and impulse, beauty and violence. His own interest in a time before permanently fractured attention gives those ideas a quietly contemporary edge, even when the song itself feels deliberately detached from modern production perfection.

Working alongside van den Bogaerde, multi-instrumentalist Derrick J. Hines and visual artist Jamie Preisz, his new album, also called 'Strange Animals', seems to explore as much around process as it does a finished product.

The result feels intimate, imperfect and unusually alluring. Across this new release, he's listening to what happens when the rough edges and subtle marks are allowed to move entirely on their own.