Westerman

British singer and songwriter Will Westerman records understated indie pop and rock laced with progressive touches and an introspective edge under the Westerman moniker, echoing the approach of Peter Gabriel, Talk Talk, and Steely Dan. Several early tracks and a 2017 debut EP preceded his first full-length album, Your Hero Is Not Dead, which surfaced in 2020. The politically charged single “Idol; RE-run,” a collaboration with Big Thief’s James Krivchenia, preceded the Los Angeles sessions that produced his next album, An Inbuilt Fault, issued in 2023.

Westerman’s 2016 singles, captured chiefly on acoustic guitar with minimal effects and percussion, began appearing on streaming services that year. His first release on Blue Flowers Music, the August 2017 Call and Response EP, introduced keyboards and electric guitar for denser arrangements and signaled a departure from gentle folk-pop toward territory spanning 1970s soft rock, technically oriented prog rock, and present-day bedroom electronic pop. He underscored the change by enlisting his friend Bullion to produce the early 2018 two-track single “Confirmation”/“I Turned Away.”

“Confirmation” attracted modest online interest, raising Westerman’s profile and drawing attention to the rest of his 2018 output—two additional singles and the four-track EP Ark. He made his initial U.S. appearances late that year; aside from a guest vocal on Amen Dunes’ August track “L.A.,” most of 2019 was spent touring or recording. Bullion contributed to the debut-album sessions held in southern Portugal and London.

In January 2020 Westerman signed with Partisan Records (PIAS), which released the environmentally themed single “Blue Comanche,” his first new material in over a year. More singles followed before “Your Hero Is Not Dead,” reputedly composed on the day that Talk Talk’s Mark Hollis died, appeared in April; the full album Your Hero Is Not Dead arrived on Partisan in June 2020.

After the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a relocation to Athens, Greece, and a period of disillusionment with music-making, Westerman resumed songwriting with a sharper focus. The track he wrote shortly after the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol, “Idol; RE-run,” was recorded with producer and percussionist James Krivchenia of Big Thief and released in October 2022. Further sessions with Krivchenia, joined by additional Los Angeles musicians, yielded his second album, An Inbuilt Fault, which appeared in 2023.