Photo Credit: Seb Gardner
July 9, 2025 – Today, UK-based duo Sons of Sevilla announced the upcoming release of Street Light Moon, an album built for endless summers and retro-futurist reveries. Produced by GRAMMY-winning Adrian Quesada of Black Pumas, the album was inspired by a world’s worth of influences and the pursuit of a vintage, real sound. The duo of brothers Henry and Reuben Smith have also released the lead single “Butterfly,” an immersive song that conjures up the tranquil daze of Spanish summers. The band has also announced a US tour this fall with Skinshape (full list of tour dates below).
“We don’t sing about where we’re from,” says Henry. “The music escapes it. We’re trying very hard not to be an English indie rock band, because the world already has a lot of those. Instead, we’re trying to step into something else… and somewhere else.”
With a sound that exists out of time and off the map, the band draws from a world’s worth of influences: the family-owned British pub where brothers Henry and Reuben Smith grew up, watching their parents sling drinks as songs by John Prine and J.J. Cale played over the speakers; the marina in Gibraltar where they spent three weeks aboard an old fishing trawler, writing the album’s songs as waves splashed against the dock; the recording studio in Austin, Texas, where they recorded Street Light Moon with Adrian Quesada and a small group of multi-instrumentalists.
Raised on the outskirts of Leeds, Henry and Reuben spent countless hours in their parents’ taproom as pre-teens – all that time indoors was a musical education, introducing the young boys to songs by Buena Vista Social Club, Bob Dylan, Terry Reid, Neil Young, and Gene Clark. The summer months offered a different sort of education, with the family leaving their hometown of Featherstone and heading to the Spanish city of Sevilla. The area’s Mediterranean climate felt downright exotic after a long, chilly British winter, and the new city helped broaden Henry and Reuben’s appreciation for different cultures. Years later, when they began recording their debut album, the brothers nodded to those summertime vacations abroad by naming the project “Sons of Sevilla.”
The debut Lullabies for a Wildcat found the brothers working in isolation as the outside world screeched to a halt, producing every song themselves, creating high art out of lo-fi ingredients. Its follow-up, on the other hand, is every bit as colorful as the orange trees that line Sevilla’s streets. Here, we’re reintroduced to Henry and Reuben not as do-it-yourself purveyors of escapist pop music, but as sharp songwriters and musical mood-setters who’re every bit as compelling as their world-renowned producer. Their toolkit has expanded. Their list of collaborators has grown. Their musical reach has widened. With Street Light Moon, Sons of Sevilla set sail for new waters, landing at a sound entirely of the band’s making.
