Ben Heyworth’s return with ‘Creatures‘ is a reintroduction and a quiet triumph. Years after releasing music under his name, Heyworth’s new three-track EP delivers an intimate, deeply poetic collection of songs that feel anchored in place and adrift in imagination. It’s a record of subtle complexity, rich with layered harmonies, lyrical vulnerability, and sonic textures that echo the murmur of Manchester’s canals and the spectral flickers of inner lives.
Opening with “Narrowboat,” Heyworth grounds the listener immediately in his present geography: Ancoats Marina, a watery slipstream through Manchester’s creative quarter. It is a song about a spiritual reflection. There’s a gentle sway in the rhythm, mimicking the canal itself, while the lyrics oscillate between the elemental and the emotional. “Days, as I live and breathe / They lift me like the breath of the morning” is a hymn to renewal and a whispered elegy. The smoky imagery and lo-fi folk stylings is like a nod to Nick Drake by way of Neil Finn, with Heyworth’s honeyed vocals carrying the song into meditative territory.
“Image of Roads” takes a thematic detour into imagined Americana. With its references to blue Mustangs, long drives, and illusory distances, the song is a clever narrative trick—a road trip that may never have happened. Musically, it swells with synthetic flourishes and a driving pulse that subtly nods to his electronic ‘This Morning Call‘. But this is no celebration of motion, but a metaphor for escapism, self-deception, and the disorientation of time. “Is this a 3D export image of roads?” Heyworth asks, conjuring a landscape more simulacrum than soil. The song plays with the myth of movement, suggesting that progress is often just the illusion of momentum.
The EP culminates in the gloriously strange “Creature Double Feature,” a surrealist parade of characters and alter-egos. From “piglets and sailors” to “grebos and gaters,” Heyworth assembles a circus of archetypes in a fever-dream of identity. Here, the music veers toward the theatrical—organs swirl, rhythms stutter, and voices layer into near-chaos. Yet at the heart of it lies a fragile question: “When I look in the mirror, do I recognise myself?” This refrain becomes the emotional axis of the record—what begins as whimsy turns into self-examination, as Heyworth explores the fragmentation of self in a modern, performative world.
Thematically, ‘Creatures’ binds together three distinct meditations: on rootedness and transience, illusion and reality, identity and reflection. While each track stands confidently on its own, they form a cohesive narrative when viewed together, as if the narrowboat from track one has drifted into a digital hallucination in track two, before arriving at a carnival of selves in track three. It’s a journey not across space, but across states of mind.
Heyworth’s lyrical approach is particularly striking. He blends the personal and poetic with almost folkloric storytelling. The “kindest words” and “cheap blue style” of “Narrowboat” offer small, tactile moments of beauty amidst existential drift. “Image of Roads” is littered with cognitive dissonance, where the language of movement veils a deeper inertia. And “Creature Double Feature” moves with a postmodern pulse, celebrating ambiguity and theatricality in the age of self-surveillance and digital avatars.
Produced at Blueprint Studios, there’s a confidence in the arrangements that never overshadows the songs’ emotional heart. The production, warm and textured, lets Heyworth’s voice, still gorgeously melodic, take centre stage, while organs, subtle electronic elements, and layered backing vocals weave a soft tapestry around it. It’s a sound that feels timeless yet freshly detailed, echoing everything from Damon Albarn’s off-kilter melancholy to the quiet urbanity of Tori Amos’ narrative style.
In ‘Creatures‘, Ben Heyworth offers a brief but powerful glimpse into his internal world—a world shaped by memory, myth, and a deep sense of place. These are songs to hear and inhabit. The EP’s strength lies in its ability to hold stillness and movement in tension, to ask questions without demanding answers, and to explore the borders between who we are, who we think we are, and who we pretend to be. A compelling and haunting return.
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