Reverend & The Makers Trace a Pivot to Soul on a Record Built Around Grief and an ADHD Diagnosis

The title of the next Reverend & The Makers album lands as a question, not a statement. Is This How Happiness Feels, due later this year, takes its name from a brief, unexpected moment of contentment Jon McClure felt in Goa in 2023. It didn’t last. The record that formed around it quickly became something else entirely.

McClure lost his father to lung cancer shortly after that trip. The diagnosis came fast, the ground shifted, and the album followed that rupture wherever it led. At the same time, McClure received his own ADHD diagnosis, which he describes as central to understanding the lifelong emotional swings that have always marked his writing. These aren’t biographical footnotes. They are the structural beams of the record.

Musically, the band has taken a hard turn. The polished, retro-leaning pop of 2023’s Heatwave In The Cold North is gone, replaced by a live, roots-driven approach steeped in soul. The arrangements breathe differently. Horns and rhythm work carry more weight. The sound is less produced, more immediate, built around the kind of interplay you get from a working band in a room rather than layers assembled in post.

That shift makes sense given the material. Songs written in the wake of a parent’s death don’t need much dressing up. McClure sounds like he’s chasing something sturdier now, a sound that can hold grief and fleeting calm in the same frame without smoothing over either one.

The Goa moment still sits at the album’s emotional center, a flash of peace that the rest of the record complicates, questions, and sometimes contradicts. McClure isn’t pretending to have landed anywhere settled. Is This How Happiness Feels doesn’t sound like an answer. It sounds like a band working through a very specific set of questions with the tools they trust most.