Jessie Ware

Jessie Ware spent most of the 2010s making a specific kind of music: sophisticated British soul with one foot in classic songwriting and one in contemporary production, the kind of record that felt at home in both a late-night kitchen and an editorial playlist. It was good. Then, with What’s Your Pleasure? in 2020, she changed everything, and the change was so complete and so right that it retroactively reframed her whole catalog.

Ware was born in Hammersmith, London in 1984 and grew up in a family that valued conversation and culture, which comes through in the confidence with which she navigates ideas. She studied at the University of Sussex and came to music not through a traditional industry pipeline but through a series of collaborations, including early work with Sampha, that positioned her as part of a new wave of British soul and R&B artists emerging in the early 2010s. Her debut, Devotion, arrived in 2012 to real critical heat.

The records that followed, Tough Love and Glasshouse, were good albums made by a person still figuring out what she was best at. There was warmth in them, real craft, but also a sense of Ware trying on different registers without fully committing to any. Then the pandemic happened, her Table Manners podcast with her mother Lennie became an unexpected cultural institution, and something shifted.

What’s Your Pleasure? dropped in 2020 and was a full disco reinvention, joyous and sophisticated and completely assured. It sounded like Ware had stopped asking permission. That! Feels Good! in 2023 extended the streak, doubling down on the dance floor orientation while opening up space for tenderness and real feeling. She headlined Alexandra Palace. She A&R’d her own records. She became, on her own terms, a legitimate pop auteur.

Now comes Superbloom, out April 10th, and the singles suggest she is not resting on the formula. “I Could Get Used to This,” “Ride,” and the most recent single “Automatic” (featuring a spoken cameo from actor Colman Domingo) have positioned the album as both an extension of the dance-pop orientation and a deeper look at the relationships and fears that live underneath the sequins. Ware has described it as exploring “fantasy world and escapism” alongside “real relationships and the fears of losing them.”

That combination, joy and anxiety living in the same body, is what has always made Ware’s best work resonate. She is not a cold technician. The feeling in her voice is real. What the last few records have done is give her production frames worthy of what she is bringing to the microphone.

Ware is currently on tour supporting the album across the UK and Europe, with dates extending through summer 2026. For a singer who spent years being compared to everyone except herself, Superbloom arrives as further proof that she figured out who she actually is, and that person is considerably more interesting than any reference point.