SINGAPORE—London-based four-piece PREP drops a new single “Call It” via Bright Antenna Records, featuring Eddie Chacon. With this single release, they are announcing their new album ‘The Programme’ out June 7th.
On their exciting collaboration with Eddie Chacon, PREP shares, “This was one of the really great days to be in PREP. We’re huge fans of Eddie Chacon, and the stunning records he’s been making with John Carroll Kirby, so when we heard he was up for getting together to write it felt like an unreal honor.
The song came together in a magical couple of hours, everyone playing whatever synths and strange instruments were lying around—I think there’s still a bit of my electric sitar from that day on the record. Anderson Paak had left a bottle of tequila in the studio after a Grammys party, so as we finished the day we were able to give the song a proper LA musical blessing.”
Photo credit: Ian Hippolyte via Bright Antenna Records
“We’ve had an extraordinary year, traveling all over the world, gathering ideas, searching out new people we wanted to collaborate with, and this record really tells the story of all of that,” the band adds on the upcoming album.
“There’s a whole list of other musicians who’ve come inside the project with us for these songs, Renaud Letang, Eddie Chacon, Phum Viphurit, Vicky Farewell, Anomalie, all of them bringing real inspiration and helping us find new places for the PREP sound to go. And at the same time this feels like a record that, more than anything we’ve put out so far, is the sound of the four of us, playing in a room together.”
PREP is currently on tour in Asia, playing shows across the region in cities including Bangkok, Taipei, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, and Manila. They previously toured Asia in 2023 where they played at VERY Festival in Thailand before heading to China for a string of headline shows and finished off the run with Clockenflap in Hong Kong.
The band now has over 500,000 monthly listeners and subscribers from Southeast Asia alone, and the band hallmarks their time building their fanbase in Asia as an important pivot where PREP’s sense of sonic possibility expanded. “At one point we thought PREP would just be a studio project,” keyboardist Llywelyn ap Myrddin elaborates. “But we played gigs that went really well, and we spent some amazing time in Asia.”
In 2015, the four members of PREP came together to cut deep grooves that mine contemporary R&B and electronica while hearkening back to the soft, sheer sound of the late ’70s and early ’80s—what some listeners have retroactively dubbed yacht rock. The love for that style united vocalist-lyricist Tom Havelock, keyboardist Llywelyn Ap Myrddin, drummer Guillaume Jambel, and producer Dan Radclyffe. PREP is pop music that feels tip-of-the-tongue familiar even though you’ve never heard it before.
The freshness of fusing well-worn genre tunes with modern sounds is a product of the distinct backgrounds that make up the group. Llywelyn has a classical music education in composition and piano; Guillaume moonlights as a house producer and DJ; Dan produces hip-hop; and Tom works as a pen-for-hire songwriter in the pop music world.
Image artwork courtesy of Bright Antenna Records
‘The Programme’ Tracklisting:
1. Infinity Pool
2. Call It feat Eddie Chacon
3. Getaway feat Phum Viphurit
4. Open Up
5. One Track Life
6. Only Love
7. Close As We Get feat Vicky Farewell
8. Situation
9. Last Plane Out
10. The Programme
Fans can listen to “Call It” here ffm.to/Call_It and pre-save ‘The Programme’ here: ffm.to/TheProgramme