Recent episodes of Table Manners, the podcast Jessie Ware co-hosts with her mother, Lennie, have begun with a brief advert for Ware’s new album: listeners, it advises, can get 10% off by preordering Superbloom using a special code. The fact that the advert is directing traffic from Ware’s podcast to her music feels slightly telling. As side hustles go, Table Manners has proved extraordinarily successful, attracting A-list guests: Margot Robbie, Jeremy Allen White, Paul McCartney, Robert De Niro. Indeed, it’s proved so successful that it scarcely seems like a side hustle at all: in 2026, Ware is probably better known as a podcaster than a singer. Hats off to her: in an uncertain era, when rock and pop artists are well advised to have a backup plan, there’s something hugely impressive about how big Ware’s has become. Still, there lurks the danger of her music seeming an afterthought: like the 10% off ad, something to get out of the way before the more serious business of enjoying banana bread with Lisa Kudrow.

The artwork for Superbloom. Photograph: Publicity image

You can hear the impact of Table Manners on Superbloom in a literal sense: a track called Automatic features a deep-voiced spoken-word appearance from Euphoria star Colman Domingo, previously a guest on the podcast. It’s also an album marked by a sense of doubling down. Ware’s third album in a row to mine a disco-pop hybrid, it’s also the most straightforwardly retro of the trio, sanding away the sheen of futuristic electronica found on 2020’s What’s Your Pleasure? and 2023’s That! Feels Good! in favour of lush orchestration: even the most synth-heavy tracks here speak less of the present than they do the early 80s post-disco boogie genre.

It also significantly amps up both its predecessors’ USP, combining camp with grownup pop. “I’m a lover, a freak and a mother,” she sang on 2023’s Pearls; here, you get to hear her three children on the ballad 16 Summers, its lyrical theme not a million miles away from Abba’s Slipping Through My Fingers. If Pearls has the hint of a show tune about it, Don’t You Know Who I Am? goes full Shirley Bassey, albeit accompanied by a four-to-the-floor beat. “I need a wood-chopping guy giving love,” she sings on a track called Sauna: the fact that it’s preceded by a wildly melodramatic instrumental intro called Chariots of Love might be entirely coincidental, rather than a knowing reference to Chariots, once the UK’s largest gay sauna, but you wouldn’t put money on it. Debuted in 2024 onstage at Glastonbury’s legendary queer club NYC Downlow, Ride marries “come be my cowboy” lyrics to the sound of a whip cracking and a sample of the whistle from Ennio Morricone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly theme. Anyone without an extremely high threshold for the intentionally tacky may consider galloping off into the sunset long before it ends.

Jessie Ware: Automatic – video

But if Superbloom feels less a development than a retrenchment – the work of an artist who now knows exactly who her audience are and is more than happy to cater for them – that shouldn’t stand as a judgment on its quality. Grownup, disco-infused pop is a crowded market, but Ware has consistently distinguished herself by the classiness of what she does, and the sense that she has great taste, truly loves and understands her source material and surrounds herself with likeminded collaborators. That’s as evident as ever on Superbloom, an album that, for all its kitschy moments, is very well written and well made. It lacks a banger quite as undeniable as its predecessor’s Free Yourself – a song that, in a sane world, would have been No 1 for months – but it definitely doesn’t want for great melodies or choruses. The string arrangements scrupulously avoid glitterball cliches: instead, they are delightfully haunted by the ghost of Chicago’s psychedelic soul maestro Charles Stepney, his opulent influence particularly apparent on the title track and No Consequences. The thrillingly spare sound and rattling percussion of Mr Valentine evokes another post-disco development, the Paradise Garage-approved punk funk of Liquid Liquid and ESG. Like the impassioned ferocity of Ware’s vocals – she sounds as if she means it, even on a song as daft as Ride – it’s a world away from the tacky 70s night signifiers of the less artful practitioners in her field.

Clearly Superbloom can’t deliver the jolt of What’s Your Pleasure?, an album that represented a distinct pivot away from Ware’s earlier pursuit of standard mainstream pop success (production from Benny Blanco, co-writes with Ed Sheeran) and her finding a lane that suited her perfectly. If Superbloom is the sound of her staying in that lane, it’s at least one that she dominates comfortably. And if pop were to lose her entirely to the world of podcasting, it would be a pity.

This week Alexis listened to

Paul Weller – What Was I Made For?
From the compilation Weller at the BBC Vol 2, the deeply improbable and surprisingly moving sound of the 67-year-old’s heartfelt take on Billie Eilish’s contribution to the Barbie soundtrack, in the process transforming it into a meditation on ageing and loss.