The Big Moon’s Forever finds pop-disco joy after hearing loss

By Tom Whitfield

In 2024, Juliette Jackson, frontwoman of the Big Moon, was diagnosed with a cholesteatoma, a destructive cyst inside the middle ear that requires surgical removal.

It caused her to lose most of her hearing on one side. Her fourth album, Forever, grows from that diagnosis and the pressure it places on a musician whose work and income depend on sound.

Jackson said: “It was pretty much existential, because writing songs is my job and my identity.” At first, the songs she could manage were so miserable that she disliked them. She then reversed course, writing not only to cheer herself up but to imagine “a happy ending that didn’t exist yet”.

The Big Moon has been active for 12 years, with Jackson, a former waitress who dreamed big, at the front. The band has released four albums, including Forever. It earned a Mercury nomination for its 2017 debut, Love in the 4th Dimension, and has had decent chart positions and good-sized gigs.

The band’s streaming figures sit in the hundreds of thousands and, for the 2019 single “Your Light”, the millions.

The early catalogue establishes the contrast. The debut offered ramshackle, wide-eyed pop; Walking Like We Do detailed the travails of contemporary womanhood. On “Your Light”, Jackson bemoaned her generation’s lot with weary resignation: “We were promised the world, but so was everyone else”.

Jackson conceived Here Is Everything during Covid in 2022 and processed her life-changing experience of becoming a mother, including the disorientation of sleep deprivation. Those pressures affected a broad section of the population, but the diagnosis altered her relationship to sound.

That shift has precedents. New Order moved from Ian Curtis’s death and the grand, morose debut Movement toward the cleaner pop of Temptation and Power, Corruption and Lies. The Cure made its own mid-1980s turn toward pop after years of anguished records, while Bon Iver moved from the isolated log-cabin recording of For Emma, Forever Ago to the lush, celebratory Bon Iver, Bon Iver.

These comparisons establish a pattern, not a direct model. The result is a buoyant, uplifting and ethereally polished pop-disco record, with added charge because it emerged from sadness.

Gravity opens on the simple joy of picking up a child from nursery. Its shimmery pop has shades of Blondie’s Dreaming era.

“Three Things” turns toward youth and pop, with Jackson observing, “My whole life imminent / I remember living inside the songs on the radio”. Bouncy, MGMT-like keyboards and juddering new-wave disco sequencers nearly smother the song’s wistful undertow.

The broadly relatable “Fun” imagines life beyond constraints: “I’ll slip away and take my brain on holiday”. Its summery sound recalls Haim and Madonna around Holiday.

Across the album, Jackson’s recurring theme is relishing life’s transience rather than fearing it. “F.O.R.E.V.E.R” combines delicate harmonies, a Fleetwood Mac-style production sheen and Soph Nathan’s emphatic guitar twangs.

It urges listeners to seize moments and milestones while possible: “some day the ocean will include the drinks that we spill / And rain that used to be red wine will fall on this hill”.

The yearning, 1960s-pop-tinged “Can I Get a Reading Please” continues that theme: “Life’s not long, regret is though / Can you tell me something I don’t know?”

The slightly country “Sounds” goes darker, warning, “I’m going to lose something very dear to me, if not now eventually”. It also insists, “I can give a good life / As long as I’m still on my feet”. The record’s sunniness does not erase those shadows.

“I See You, Honey”, with its Bananarama-like profile, finds comfort in being loved: “There’s no need to say ‘I love you’, it’s everywhere to me”. “Speed Bump” celebrates determination, with Jackson “pushing through” obstacles.

The title track, “You Remind Me That I’m Dying (And That It’s Good to Be Alive)”, gathers those strands into what may be the year’s most bittersweet euphoric chorus. The song is “an absolute banger”: its uplift carries mortality rather than dispelling it, which suggests Jackson and her band have reasons to smile.

Another listening note

Dave’s closing listening note points to Never Ever Ever by Nell Davies. He caught the Penzance-based DIY singer-guitarist’s “ace set” in Leeds and describes how she “sounds, wonderfully, like an effervescent, witty, one-woman Buzzcocks”. He also notes that she tours by train.

What does this change for the Big Moon?

It changes the stakes of the band’s fourth album. Forever does not ask listeners to treat its brightness as proof that Jackson’s illness has been solved. No surgery update is given, and Jackson’s present hearing is not described, so the medical situation remains unresolved in the account.

For the band, the achievement is a record that makes uplift part of the subject rather than merely the arrangement. It also sets a test for later work: the pop-disco pulse must keep enough emotional weight to preserve the difference between joy and escape.

If the next record retains that tension, Forever will look less like a crisis response than a change in what the Big Moon can make.