Album Review: Yellow Days - Hotel Heaven (Sugar Load Recordings)

Yellow Days, born George van den Broek, returns with a compact circle of songs about youth entangled within pleasure and performance. His voice still has a sandpaper falsetto and a Ray Charles fixation that hums in the background, but here, things feel tighter and more assured. Hotel Heaven lasts just 26 minutes yet speaks like a slim novella. Where A Day in a Yellow Beat sprawled, this one distills. Bucharest will get to test the mood in the flesh when he brings it to Control Club on November 29.

As a whole, the set drifts like a lounge band between numbers. “Mrs Moonlight” prowls through satin Rhodes and bass. “You’re So Cool” follows with a lazy, smiling groove that pretends not to care. He slips in a line, “We could moonwalk down the side streets,” and the whole song glides a few inches off the floor.

Then come the velvet sermons. “Finer Things in Life” treats luxury like a comfort prayer. When he sings “I don’t like oysters far too much, I prefer your loving touch,” the arrangement seems to agree that intimacy beats the tasting menu. “Higher Room” nudges that thought upward. The idea is not excessive; it is how ease becomes ritual and how that ritual can blur into performance. The quiet twin of this, “Crying For Help,” arrives over dub-soft drums and sighing keys without raising its voice.

The album imagines a hotel floating above the aftermath of ravenous appetite. A metaphor for bought convenience and meanings that fray at the edges. The concierge is a weary God figure who types out fates on a dusty typewriter and smokes throughout his shift. Van den Broek paints the rooms with tones that nod and shift. Prince shades the harmonies. A hint of Ariel Pink’s warped lounge bends the light. The phrasing hints at Bowie’s theater and Dylan’s nasal candor.

Every track was written, performed, produced, and engineered at home in a Brick Lane flat.

Friends pass through the frame, including Robert Glasper, John Carroll Kirby, and Lemar Carter, while the architecture remains unmistakably personal. Songs don't end so much as thin out, slipping down the corridor. The closer, “Planet Earth,” sketches this gravity without actually landing.

The surprise is how inviting it all is. Terminal luxury turns into a candlelit groove that never forces the issue. The album smiles a little too widely, and that feels right. File the mood beside Eyes Wide Shut, where seduction and unease share the same air. By the time the falsetto climbs and the bass circles the same conclusion again, you stop asking for directions. You're already checked in.