As One True Pairing, the former Wild Beasts bassist and vocalist Tom Fleming delves further into the intricacies of masculinity while confronting wider concerns such as class divisions and Brexit’s repercussions across the U.K. With the 2019 release One True Pairing, he captured this overlap of private experience and public upheaval through a jagged collection of tracks that fused his rich baritone with anthemic ’80s heartland rock and gritty synth pop, a sound he refined with greater assurance on 2024’s Endless Rain.
Fleming, a singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist, first experimented with music during his teenage years in northern England by capturing ideas on a four-track cassette recorder. In 2005, while attending university in Leeds, he joined Wild Beasts on bass; the group’s expansive, chamber-pop-inflected work drew widespread praise, including a Mercury Prize nomination for the 2009 album Two Dancers, and achieved commercial traction when 2014’s Smother entered the Top 10 of the U.K. Albums Chart. After issuing 2017’s Boy King, Wild Beasts disbanded.
Following the group’s farewell gestures—among them the EP Punk Drunk and Trembling, an accompanying tour, and the live anthology Last Night All My Dreams Came True recorded at RAK Studios—Fleming paused to allow perspective to form. Returning to songwriting, he channeled the class tensions behind Brexit and related political upheaval in the U.K. alongside the notions of masculinity he had already probed with Wild Beasts. Adopting the name One True Pairing from the fan-fiction phrase for an ideal romantic match, he drew on Bruce Springsteen and Tom Petty’s blue-collar narrative approach as well as the sharper synth textures of Swans and Depeche Mode. He cut the debut album with producer and mixer Ben Hillier, who also contributed drums and synths, and One True Pairing surfaced in September 2019 via Domino Records.
After a surge of fresh material, Fleming relocated in 2022 to Dublin’s Hellfire studio alongside producer John “Spud” Murphy to track the second album. With assistance from Lankum’s Cormac Mac Diarmada, Percolator’s Eleanor Mylor, and arranger/engineer Josh Taylor-Moon, he emphasized traditional music and noise-rock textures across the character portraits that comprise October 2024’s Endless Rain.
