Oliver Paul Tries to Find His Footing Without Tidying the Stumble

Oliver Paul is twenty-one, from the East Midlands, and freshly out of BIMM University in Birmingham. His real name is Oliver Newton. The project name is the public one, and Find Your Footing is the first single from the first body of work he is willing to call post-university. He describes the sound as a messy mix of post-punk, art rock and power pop, then tightens the pitch into something sharper: messy melodic art punk for the kids who got picked last in PE. That line is useful because it already contains the whole attitude. Heart first. Room for mistakes. A sting when the song needs one.

He wrote the track in his final semester, when the future stopped being an abstract and started sitting on the edge of the bed. The song is a note of comfort he sent himself, with the usual cynicism left in so the comfort does not turn into a slogan. Producer Sam Cook, who works as Peevee’s Head, came into the picture about eighteen months earlier at a Black Country, New Road show. They bonded over music, comedy, and Wallace and Gromit. That last detail matters more than it looks.

Wallace and Gromit is English claymation about rooms that are slightly too small and inventions that work until they do not. The figures look handmade. The affection lives in the joints. You can see the fingerprints. Find Your Footing was recorded in about two hours on the second day of a five or six day album session at Sam’s house in Lichfield, inside his dad’s study. Most parts took two takes at most. Paul says the slightly messy playing is part of the charm, and that you can record good music anywhere. The study is not a mythic studio. It is a room with a door. That is the Wallace and Gromit logic of the record. Friendship, a borrowed space, plasticine timing, and a song that keeps its fingerprints visible.

The guitar is the first thing that tells you where the track lives. A bright electric line, close to jangle, with enough bite to keep it from turning cute. Paul has named two sources of heat: Dan Parr and his project The Last Whole Earth Catalog, whose warmth he wants in his own playing, and Big Star’s In The Street, which he had on repeat while writing. You can hear both without photocopying either. The riff has that power-pop lift, the feeling of a street song that wants to be hummed on the way home. The vocal stays close and a little dry, then roughens when the chorus opens. He does not belt for victory. He pushes just far enough for the anxiety to show.

The lyric is the social panic of standing in a room and hearing your own volume. Collapse onto the carpet. Pull the pillow to your chest. Go down to the market. Pick a nice tie for your dress. Smile as if you’re happy. Feeling like you’re in control. Then the hook, which is the whole weather system of the song: Find your footing. I think I’m coming in too strong. I’ve never felt like I belong. Later it slips into dissociation, the afterparty somewhere downtown, the thought that none of this is real. There is even a line that admits the form is failing him. There’s not enough words in this song. That is a young writer being honest about the limit of the page, and it lands because the arrangement does not decorate the confession.

Paul keeps a line from Almost Famous in his head when he records. It is all about what you leave out. You can hear the principle in the way a motif appears once and does not get milked. The song moves quickly, but it does not pile on extra language to prove it is deep. The cynicism is a pinch of salt, not a pose. Only fools are happy. We’ve outsmarted them. Then the chorus returns and undercuts the swagger. The smartest person in the room is still looking for the floor.

The video understands the same economy. It is shot like a private afternoon that got promoted to a release. Dry grass. A high field under a hard sky. A thick suburban hedge. Yellow captions that throw the lyric onto the picture without ceremony. Paul stands in a striped shirt with a mint Strat covered in stickers and plays as if the camera wandered into the take. Close-ups of the fretboard. A walking shot down an ordinary street of houses and parked cars. A smile that arrives late and looks unplanned. The locations are the English non-places where a lot of early adult life actually happens. Not a club. Not a skyline. A pavement, a hedge, a field that used to mean summer and now means waiting.

That visual world fits the title with unusual precision. Finding your footing is a physical phrase before it is an emotional one. The clip keeps putting him on ground that is slightly uneven, slightly public, slightly nothing. He looks for a place to stand while the song keeps accusing him of arriving too hard, too fast. The DIY grain is not a budget apology. It is the correct temperature for a track recorded in a study and written as a self-addressed warning.

A first single after graduation carries a particular weight. The degree ends. The timetable disappears. Friends scatter. The next version of yourself has not arrived yet. Find Your Footing does not solve that interval. It gives it a riff and a place to walk. Paul has already pulled three old university friends into a backing band, with a gig still taking shape. Updates live on @oliverpaul_uk. The song already sounds like that in-between week, when you are no longer a student and not yet whatever the next press line will call you.

What stays is the human temperature. The playing is a little loose. The video is a little handheld. The lyric admits the social misfire before it asks for sympathy. That is why the single has presence. It treats awkwardness as material, not as a flaw to be mixed out. Oliver Paul puts the first public foot down on ordinary ground. The step is the point.

Follow Oliver Paul

Find Your Footing is out now.

Listen: Spotify

Follow: Instagram · YouTube · TikTok