For the Time Being is five songs from a period when my life stopped looking quite how it had for eleven years. Some of it is about what I left behind, including a few things I probably should have noticed sooner. Some of it is about buying clothes I wouldn’t normally wear, seeing someone without deciding what to call it, and discovering that an evening alone can just be an evening alone. I haven’t worked everything out, and I’m not particularly interested in pretending I have. This is where I am at the moment. For the time being, that’ll do.

One Law for Everyone was inspired by a 76-year-old pensioner who managed to turn a burqa into something considerably more troublesome than a fashion statement. He’s studying Islam, considering conversion and identifies as a woman. Britain has spent years explaining how important it is to respect religious belief, gender identity and the law. Splendid principles, all of them. Then along comes an elderly gentleman who decides to take the instructions rather literally, and suddenly everyone needs to consult the manual. The police have their interpretation, the courts have theirs, and somewhere in Whitehall there’s probably a civil servant frantically searching for the section entitled “What If Somebody Actually Tries This?” The remarkable thing is that he hasn’t needed a megaphone, a protest march or even a particularly sturdy pair of shoes. Just a veil and an apparent willingness to test how all these carefully worded principles fit together. Whether his legal argument succeeds is for the court to decide. In the meantime, the questions are rather entertaining. One law for everyone. Apparently. Just don’t ask everyone at once.

Most of these songs began life as headlines. They arrived with great urgency, dominated the country for somewhere between six hours and three days, then quietly disappeared beneath the next manufactured emergency. By Friday you’d forgotten Monday. By next month everyone was arguing about something else. The stories moved on. The questions rarely did.

I started writing these because I realised I couldn’t remember what we’d all been furious about a fortnight earlier. Every week came with another announcement, another review, another promise, another official explanation for why something obvious wasn’t actually happening. It struck me that if I couldn’t remember them, perhaps that was rather convenient for the people responsible.

So this isn’t really an album. It’s evidence. Fourteen moments the news cycle expected everyone to forget. Maybe you’ll agree with every song. Maybe you’ll disagree with every one. Either way, at least they’ll still exist after the headlines have gone.

It’s Normal Now looks at the little behaviours everyone quietly adopted while insisting nothing much had changed. Accept the terms, rate the experience, track the sleep, trust the screen and carry on. None of it arrived with a grand announcement. It just became routine, then sensible, then somehow obvious. The clever bit is how quickly people stop asking who decided any of it in the first place.

I’m Doing Fine is about that slightly inconvenient stage of moving on when life really has got better, but you haven’t become quite as indifferent as you’d like to think. The routines have changed, the room feels like yours again and hearing their name doesn’t ruin the day anymore. That’s progress. Still hoping they occasionally realise what they lost? Apparently, that can come along for the ride.

Different Day is a collection of songs about the moments that usually go unnoticed. Bus journeys, supermarket bargains, old friends, evening walks and familiar routines become quiet reminders that everyday life doesn’t need to be extraordinary to matter.

One Good Day opens Different Day with a quiet celebration of ordinary luck. Nothing miraculous happens. A bus arrives on time, the milk is still fresh, a friend gets in touch. Sometimes that’s enough.

Manual To Success presents itself as a structured programme built from numbered steps, brief broadcasts and quiet moments of reflection. As the sequence progresses, familiar language gradually gives way to increasingly unusual observations, yet the Manual never abandons its calm, procedural voice. Each completed stage quietly redefines the one before it, until the programme no longer appears to be something being followed, but something that has already become part of the participant.

Please Sir, Can I Have Some More? is RebelliousBard with the politeness finally wearing thin. Across the album, Britain’s institutions, political class and changing sense of itself are dragged into the argument: who gets listened to, who is expected to accommodate whom, what we’re still allowed to value, and why questioning any of it so often seems to be the greater offence. Angry, sarcastic and deliberately unwilling to find a comfortable middle ground, this is a record about watching the country change, refusing to pretend everything is fine, and believing that what remains is still worth fighting for.

Buh-Bye Keir is RebelliousBard’s thoroughly unsentimental farewell to Keir Starmer after a premiership that lasted less than two years. Farmers, pensioners, immigration, taxation, two-tier justice and the endless procession of nicknames all get one final outing as the song surveys what RebelliousBard regards as an extraordinarily destructive period of government. There is no gracious send-off and no sudden outbreak of respect for the office. Starmer is leaving; the argument here is that Britain still has to live with what he leaves behind.