A Human, Horn-Led Debut That Reframes Freak Power, Paul Simon, And The Joy Of Playing Together
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Ashley Slater has spent years moving between jazz, pop and dance with the ease of someone who knows the rules well enough to bend them. On This Is Fucking Nice, the debut from Ashley Slater’s Heptet, that instinct lands in a bright, brassy burst. Built with Czech Hammond organist Jan Korinek, the record treats the band like an enlarged organ trio, swapping out guitar for a four-piece horn section that presses and glows like a second keyboard. The result is dense, sly, and full of muscle.
Recorded at Golden Hive Studios in Prague with no click tracks and no digital polish smoothing the edges, the album feels alive in the room. Six players lock in, breathe, and push each other forward in real time, with Slater later adding vocals back in Chemnitz. That old-school process matters here. You can hear the friction, the swing, the small human imperfections that give the songs their heat. Slater has called it “the antidote to AI,” and the phrase fits: this is music that insists on touch, timing and chemistry.
The material itself moves with real character. Slater revisits his own writing and Freak Power cuts, reshaping them rather than simply replaying them. Turn On Tune In Cop Out
arrives with fresh bite, its familiar shape rebuilt by the Heptet’s brass-heavy machinery, all punchy riffs and elastic groove. There’s also a striking take on Paul Simon’s Still Crazy After All These Years
, which opens with a New Orleans-style brass band introduction before settling into something smoother and more intimate, the kind of arrangement that makes you sit up a little straighter.
What gives This Is Fucking Nice its charm is how confidently it trusts the players. Oliver Lipensky’s drums keep the frame taut, while Osian Roberts (baritone sax), Aleksy Svidersky (tenor sax) and Hermon Mehari (trumpet) turn the horn section into a force that can snarl, shimmer or step into the space a guitar might normally occupy. Slater’s trombone and vocals sit inside that sound rather than floating above it. Even the guest spots from rising German singer LEAF (Right Here, Right Now
– One Breath Away
) feel folded into the record’s wider pulse.
There’s a warmth to the album, but also a sense of intent. It sounds like a band that wanted to make something tactile, something that remembers how good it feels when musicians listen hard and react in the same breath. For Ashley Slater’s Heptet, that’s the thrill: not perfection, but presence.
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