“I would feel the light go out of the moon if albums were not made. It’s a craft. Albums mark time, they soundtrack lives”. Jesca Hoop knows this. After all, she has just made a modern classic with Long Wave Home. Who will get to know?

Season 13, Ep. 7: jesca hoop taps into the torque.

Jesca Hoop is now seven albums into a “successful” career. Except Jesca had to check her bank account before she felt she could afford to make another album. “I thought I was gonna go dead broke before I made this one”. I’m glad she did not, because Long Wave Home is exceptional - a real end-to-end delight and just about my favourite album of 2026 so far. I doubt anything will surpass it in my ears. 

Jesca is talking to me from her base “nestled in the redwood trees of Northern California”, a long way from her current home - the ‘town’ of Manchester, England (nod & wink for those following current affairs). She's back in the States assembling a touring band - busy getting the posse together. Visa costs for British musicians make crossing the Atlantic prohibitive so every US run means going back to the notice board. This time her lineup includes members of the avant-folk group Fawn Fables, artists she calls formative influences from her own youth, alongside an old childhood friend. 

That sense of long relationships runs through everything Hoop tells me about Long Wave Home, a record she made almost entirely on her own terms - self-produced, self-managed, stitched together in patches between tour dates, mixed on headphones and scheduled while driving - but a somehow perfect end product. 

She describes the record as "a vote of confidence...an investment in myself as an artist and authority over my vocation and life's path." Asked to unpack that, she goes straight to the unsettling fear beneath creating anew each time in the album cycle: starting a new chapter with "no songs, perhaps no solution for a release," just a blank slate with a big question mark in the middle. In the end, "It was just the decision that the candle was worth the wick." Hoop is a master of understatement - also describing the album-making process as “agitating”. "It's not a peaceful process for me," she says. Self-doubt, she argues, isn't an obstacle to the work; it is the work, or at least the toll one pays to access it - the price of admission. 

She describes sitting for hours to write a song in which "nothing is entering the frame" - but rather than treating that frustration as wasted effort, she reframes it as mechanical, almost physical: "It's like knocking the rust off the cog, and it's the feeling of torque. And the torque, that's that work feeling, and it's frustrating. But if you can recognize what it is, it doesn't stop you, you keep on going." The torque, she explains, doesn't switch off when she leaves the desk, but keeps "working throughout your body subconsciously," resurfacing as connected fragments the next time she sits down. 

That idea - songwriting as a subconscious machine left running between the working sessions - says a lot about how Hoop has learned to work over a long career. She's also become, more recently, a ruthless editor of her own instincts. Where her early records were structurally "bonkers," (her own word), she's since learned the process of rewriting, and above all the discipline of muting. "Muting is one of the things that I have come to love more than anything," she says, describing it as "clearing the weeds out of a bed so that the focal point... has root space to blossom." 

It's a discipline she needed on Long Wave Home with its fragmented process of creation. I hesitate to say it, but after a long time blossoming as a singer-songwriter, it feels like Hoop has reached a creative peak exercising these new powers. As for the results, well the pleasure is now ours. And Jesca’s still - as she looks forward to playing modern classics such as “Playground” and “Caravan” in front of live audiences. 

So, seven albums and two decades into a career but a brittle bank balance. Not great but par for the course in the modern day music ecosystem. No wonder Jesca doesn’t give herself time to celebrate her considerable successes. She’s made brilliant albums. She just played Union Chapel. She has collaborated with amazing artists and producers. She has been invited to a Joni Jam*. 

You could say Jesca is a “cult artist”. Never in the mainstream. No hits. Never been in the album charts. But, she has the respect of peers, a dedicated fan base and has a catalogue of real clout; critically revered and much loved. I’d say Jesca Hoop is a Quiet Legend. As such, like many others operating in her tier of the music industry, celebrating success is not straightforward. 

What constitutes a win?

“The earlier days of visualising the physical product is a win. The tour (and playing the Union Chapel) is a win. But I’m then onto the next thing that requires my attention. I keep on saying once I get to the other side of that, but I’m not sure when I’ll carve out time to celebrate for myself, I probably need to make a point to do that”. 

Hoop is candid about the emotional economics of a self-managed career: the anxiety of unpredictable income, the impossibility of reading momentum from streaming numbers, the modest comfort of seeing her work land in real time at the merch table rather than via a chart position. She tells young artists, especially young women just starting out, to have "a conversation with your stomach" about whether they can tolerate being unseen, because, she's come to believe, "the number one thing that will cause an artist to give up is their ability, or lack of ability, to manage the times when they're unseen."

None of this is resignation. Asked whether her best work is still ahead of her, she doesn't hesitate: "I hope so." And true to form, she's already plotting the next creative wave while only fleetingly pausing to celebrate her own significance, influence and longevity. 

“To get to speak about an arc of a career. Whatever that looks like in terms of numbers, cast that aside. We’re still making records and we have the opportunity to figure out the challenges next time around, it’s life affirming. And, I don’t have a plan B so fuck it”. 

Now there is the spirit of a true and dedicated artist. 

* This is probably because Joni Mitchell knows that Jesca Hoop’s covers (with Kate Stables and Lail Arad) are very good indeed. When I ask about Jesca’s favourite Joni record, she immediately replies “For the Roses” and goes on to give the most compelling summary of that record, which enhances my own experience of listening to it the following day. Hoop narrated the excellent Legends series on Joni Mitchell for BBC Sounds. 

Long Wave Home is available on Bandcamp and Jesca tours the album in the US through the summer and then back to the UK in Autumn. Do not miss.