It is seven years since David Byrne released his last solo album, American Utopia. So much has happened in the intervening period that it’s easy to forget that, initially, the record received a mixed response. There was praise for its expansive and experimental approach: songs built on rhythms by Brian Eno were handed over to a wide selection of producers to tinker with, then Byrne compiled the finished product. Part of a larger multimedia project called Reasons to Be Cheerful, it attempted to engender a spirit of positivity, but there were complaints that this amounted to a blithe abdication of responsibility amid the first Trump presidency. Respectful long-service-medal reviews coexisted with angry fulminating over the complete absence of female contributors.

A mixed response was business as usual as far as Byrne’s post-Talking Heads career is concerned. He’s pursued an idiosyncratic path – diversions into Latin American music, opera and trip-hop, collaborations with dance producers and St Vincent – but never with results that achieved sufficient acclaim or commercial success to overshadow his former band. But then, something weird happened. The ensuing American Utopia live shows, which used cutting-edge technology and choreography to demolish the conventions of a rock show, attracted deserved hyperventilating praise. A tour that began playing modest theatres wound up filling arenas, spawning a Broadway show, two live albums – one named after a critic’s breathless assertion that it was The Best Live Show of All Time – and a Spike Lee-directed movie.

So Byrne arrives at Who Is the Sky? with his stock higher than at any point in the last 35 years. It abandons American Utopia’s patchwork approach for a more straightforward form of collaboration, the whole album recorded with Brooklyn’s 12-piece Ghost Train Orchestra and Harry Styles producer Kid Harpoon. But its raison d’être remains essentially the same: more primary-coloured musical optimism, to which end it variously employs Mariachi-style brass (What Is the Reason for It?), sweeping 40s-Hollywood-musical strings (A Door Called No), rhythms that join the dots between Cuban clave and George Michael’s Faith (Don’t Be Like That) and an off-kilter, vocoder-bedecked take on the sumptuous soul of former Byrne collaborator Thom Bell on I’m an Outsider.

Thus far, 2025 has proved so unremittingly grim that it makes 2018 look like a lost sunlit nirvana: you can understand why Byrne thinks the world needs positivity and uplift, and Who Is the Sky? frequently sounds fantastic. The arrangements are superb, particularly when driven by the woody thwack of double bass. The songs are often melodically strong. The climax of Everybody Laughs, with the voices of Byrne and St Vincent belting out over a marimba-speckled backdrop, is suitably joyous, as are the key shifts in closer The Truth. When We Are Singing’s blend of an oddly (and one suspects unwittingly) Oasis-esque guitar line with a chugging funk rhythm really works, although it’s debatable whether it strictly needed the sound of Byrne’s miaowing extempore vocals.

The sound of Byrne mewing like a cat highlights the album’s major drawback. The lyrical tone tends to jokiness, which is fine when the jokes are funny. Moisturizing Thing concerns an anti-ageing cream that works so well, it leaves the protagonist looking like a three-year-old, plagued by people talking as if he’s a toddler and constant demands for ID in bars. Or when they carry a certain potent undertow: the man singing an impassioned love song to his flat on My Apartment Is My Friend could easily be an isolated shut-in; the character bamboozled by his partner’s knowledge and understanding of films, literature and human nature in She Explains Things to Me seems suggestive of Byrne’s self-diagnosed autism.

Otherwise, as on I Met the Buddha at a Downtown Party, or The Avant Garde, they carry the awkward, faintly irritating feeling of someone trying a bit too hard to leaven the mood. Similarly, the tone of optimism can seem too pat and Pollyanna-ish without a hint of darkness. To the latter end, you could hear The Truth as a paean to love or an acknowledgment that the titular concept seems increasingly malleable in a world of disinformation and manipulation: “The truth cannot hurt me, I know what I know.” When We Are Singing at least acknowledges the pallid state of things – “we’ve got one foot in the pearly gates and one foot in the flames” – while it’s hymning music’s transportive power.

It’s hard not to have mixed feelings about Who Is the Sky?: business as usual. But perhaps it’s worth keeping American Utopia in mind. Byrne has suggested his forthcoming tour will blend “visual art, storytelling and music into one compelling live performance”. Given what happened last time around – a good album elevated to greatness on stage – that sounds intriguing: a reason to be suitably optimistic.

This week Alexis listened to

Alabama Shakes - Another Life
A decade on from their last album, Sound and Colour, Alabama Shakes return: Another Life is murky, distorted, impassioned and out-there rock-soul.