A warm, communal portrait of songs recorded live and lived in fully, Henry Grace’s sophomore album ‘Things Are Moving All Around Me’ turns shared space, restless guitars, and open-throated vocals into a welcome companion for transition – one that soothes, stirs, and carries us forward as the year unfolds.

Stream: “This Is the Place” – Henry Grace

Things are already in motion when Things Are Moving All Around Me begins.

Not in a grand, declarative way – but in the quieter sense of rooms filling with sound, songs refusing to sit still, and musicians learning how to trust what happens when they stop trying to control it. Henry Grace’s second album doesn’t announce itself as a turning point so much as it documents one in real time: a record shaped by shared space, live takes, and the feeling that something is shifting whether you’re ready or not.

Where Grace’s debut Alive In America carried the intimacy of a solitary voice finding its footing, Things Are Moving All Around Me feels collective, kinetic, and human in its imperfections. It’s a band record born out of transition – between cities, between versions of self, between holding on and letting go – and it finds its power not in resolution, but in motion itself. This is an album about learning to move with the current rather than against it, and about discovering how much can change once you invite other people into the room.

Released January 23, 2026, Things Are Moving All Around Me arrives as Henry Grace’s second full-length album and the clearest articulation yet of who he is as a songwriter – and who he’s becoming. A London-born singer/songwriter whose work has always lived at the intersection of warmth and restlessness, Grace makes music rooted in classic songcraft but shaped by real experience: Years spent moving between the UK and California, building songs quietly, and learning how to sit with both longing and resolve. Where his 2022 debut Alive In America introduced him as a solitary troubadour writing from the margins, this new record finds him stepping fully into a shared identity, fronting a band and letting collaboration reshape his sound in real time.

Atwood Magazine has followed Grace’s evolution closely, previously spotlighting him as an Artist-to-Watch and praising his ability to write from “that tender, unguarded place where songs feel less like performances and more like confessions passed across a room.” That emotional openness remains central here, but Things Are Moving All Around Me widens the frame. Co-produced with Blaine Harrison and recorded live with longtime collaborators Brian Love, Toby Evangelou, and Tom Holder, the album reflects a period of transition not just in Grace’s life, but in his creative process – a shift toward trust, collective instinct, and songs that are allowed to breathe, bend, and change shape together.

The roots of Things Are Moving All Around Me stretch back to 2022, when Grace crossed paths with Blaine Harrison at a songwriting retreat organized by Chris Difford in Glastonbury. At the time, Grace had only just begun writing what would become the album, but the connection proved foundational. “I’d just started writing this record and, over the next two years, I’d take the songs to Blaine at his studio over in Kings Cross and we’d work on them together,” Grace tells Atwood Magazine. “Blaine is such a great artist and musician and so, when I felt the record was more or less there, I asked him to co-produce it with me.”

That partnership eventually led them away from London and into Devon, recording at Middle Farm – a place that didn’t just house the sessions, but quietly shaped the album’s identity. “I think Middle Farm became a big of part of this album’s identity,” Grace reflects. “All the visuals and artwork for the album was taken from our time there.”

Rather than entering the studio with a rigid concept for the album as a whole, Grace allowed the bigger picture to emerge organically – song by song, take by take, moment by moment. “There was a definite vision for what we wanted each song to be, but in terms of a vision for the whole record, that came later,” he explains. “Going into the studio, I just wanted us to make the best thing we possibly could. We played our socks off, you could say.”

That openness is baked into the album’s title, lifted directly from the song “Things” and expanded into a wider emotional frame. “I suppose it’s now the unofficial title track,” he says. “I think the title ‘Things Are Moving All Around Me’ kind of encapsulates the feel of the album. Most of the songs are, in one way or another, about movement and transitions, so it felt appropriate.”

Just as crucial is how this record repositions Grace not as a lone narrator, but as part of a living, breathing unit. “It’s much more of a band-driven record in comparison to the first album which felt much more singular. I’ve spent the past few years playing with some wonderful musicians in Brian (Love), Toby (Evangelou), Blaine (Harrison) and Tom (Holder) and, to me, this album feels and sound like us,” he smiles.

That sense of us – imperfect, in motion, figuring it out together – becomes the emotional throughline of the album, and it’s what allows these songs to feel less like statements and more like lived moments caught on tape.

Rather than spelling everything out, Things Are Moving All Around Me lets its key moments reveal themselves through feel, texture, and circumstance.

The album opens with “Rust,” a song that immediately sets the stakes by refusing polish in favor of immediacy. It wasn’t an easy track to pin down, but its resistance to refinement ultimately shaped the way it exists on the record. “This is one of the first songs I wrote for this album, and I always hoped it might be the opener,” Grace says. “It was tough to record though. The song wanted that trashy, live, band in the room sound and so we ended up scrapping the studio version and using a live recording we made for a studio film which inadvertently also became the music video.” That decision – to trust the live take, the mess, the moment – becomes a quiet mission statement for the album that follows.

If “Rust” throws the door open, “Say Something Mean” captures the moment the outside world rushes in. Released as the album’s first single last summer, the song is inseparable from a specific stretch of time in Grace’s life – one defined by momentum, exhaustion, and a sense of disbelief at how quickly things were moving.

“We released it the week before we played Glastonbury,” he recalls. “Before going on stage, I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Eavis, which was a bit of a ‘pinch me’ moment. This song will always take me back to that time – playing five shows in under 24 hours and sitting on the hill watching Neil Young sing ‘Rockin’ in the Free World.’”

That memory lives inside the song’s sound. Previously featured on Atwood Magazine, “Say Something Mean” is restless and cathartic, built on the friction between self-reckoning and release, where heartache doesn’t collapse inward but burns its way outward. Grace has spoken about the track as a feeling-first song – one that carries lightness even when the words cut close. “I try to not give too much thought to what a song is necessarily about, because I think it’s always the feeling in a song that really draws you in,” he shares. “‘Say Something Mean’ has always felt like a positive song to me, like breaking out, even when the lyrics might suggest something else.” That duality is etched into the chorus, where vulnerability and defiance sit side by side. “I’ve been foolish with my heart, I’ve been foolish with all of my dreams,” he sings, before landing on the line that anchors the song’s emotional release: “Say something mean like it don’t mean a thing.” It’s a phrase Grace didn’t over-intellectualize – and didn’t need to.

“I could give you an answer about rejection and hurt, but really, I just loved the phrase.” Within the context of Things Are Moving All Around Me, “Say Something Mean” functions as both a snapshot and a pressure valve – a song born of motion, played in the thick of it, and forever tied to a moment when the blur of effort, joy, and disbelief finally caught up to the music itself.

Elsewhere, the smoldering, cinematic “This Is The Place” emerges as the emotional anchor, a song Grace and the band felt an immediate responsibility to get right. “To us, this felt like the most important song on the record to get right. Like most of the album, we were tracking everyone live in the room and we just got a really magic take with this song. So much so that if I had to give the rest away, it’s the one recording I’d keep.” That magic wasn’t just audible; it was visible too, captured alongside “Rust” during the same filming session, preserving the feeling of a band fully inside the moment.

Musically, “This Is The Place” moves with a slow-burning gravity – dusky guitars stretching wide, drums landing with patient weight, and Grace’s voice carrying a low, lived-in ache that feels both intimate and expansive. Lyrically, lines like “This is the house I grew up in / it gets dark here sometimes” blur physical streets with interior landscapes, turning memory into something you can almost walk through.

The album’s title track, “Things,” carries a different weight – expansive, curious, and quietly ambitious. “This was the first song I wrote for the album,” Grace notes. “I wrote it one morning in my garden before work. It’s probably the most ambitious production on the record and mixing it was a real joy. I notice something different every time I listen to it.” A gentle, dreamy folk reverie, “Things” unfurls like a gradual exhale – warm acoustic strums opening the song before layers of guitars, keys, and soft rhythmic detail bloom around Grace’s voice. His delivery is tender and searching, lingering on questions rather than answers, as imagery like “things are moving all around me / like beetle bugs in the night” captures the album’s central feeling of motion as something both beautiful and slightly disorienting.

That sense of discovery continues into the album’s later stretch, where “Days Like This” closes the record not with finality, but with reflection. “We recorded this song on our first day at Middle Farm. We’d spent the day trying and failing to record ‘Rust’ and tensions were high by the evening. We had some dinner, blew off some steam, and ended up tracking this song around some room mics in the middle of the night. Definitely one of the great moments making this record.” It’s fitting that one of the album’s most enduring memories comes not from perfection, but from release – from letting the day go and seeing what remained once the pressure lifted.

There’s a lived-in looseness to “Days Like This” that you can hear in the room itself – the soft spill of sound, the closeness of voices and instruments, the sense that the song is being held together by feel rather than force. Grace’s vocal carries a quiet resilience here, tracing memory and acceptance through lines like “I made roots so I could stand on my own two feet,” letting reflection arrive without sentimentality.

Taken as a whole, Things Are Moving All Around Me unfolds like a long walk through shifting weather – moments of drive and release giving way to stillness, memory, and quiet resolve.

The record breathes with the sound of a band playing together in real time: Drums bleeding into vocal mics, guitars rubbing against one another, rooms becoming part of the arrangement rather than something to be erased. There’s warmth here, but also restlessness; intimacy without isolation; a sense of movement that never feels rushed toward resolution. As a listener, you’re invited not to decode the songs, but to live inside them – to feel the accumulation of small moments, late nights, shared effort, and emotional openness add up into something steady and sustaining. What Grace accomplishes isn’t a declaration of arrival, but the rare feeling of being carried along by a record that trusts motion itself – and leaves you changed by the time it gently lets go.

For Grace, what lingers most from making Things Are Moving All Around Me isn’t a single song or sound, but the shared experience of creating it. “Recording ‘Days Like This’ around some room mics in the wee hours was really special. Studio time tends to blur into one so a lot of the downtime, like the big dinners at the end of each day for example, are the things you really remember.”

When asked to sum it all up, his answer is disarmingly simple: “Real team effort.” That humility runs through the album itself – a record less concerned with arrival than with honesty, connection, and the quiet courage it takes to keep moving when everything around you already is.

There’s something especially resonant about Things Are Moving All Around Me arriving at the top of the year, when reflection and forward motion naturally sit side by side.

It’s a record that meets you gently, offering warmth and welcome without asking anything of you, while still carrying enough voltage to stir something loose inside. The heavier moments hit with earned force, the gentler passages soothe rather than soften, and together they create the rare feeling of an album that can hold both stillness and momentum at once. As a listener, it becomes a companion for that in-between space – a soundtrack for looking back without getting stuck, for stepping forward without needing all the answers yet. In trusting motion over certainty, Henry Grace has made a record that doesn’t just reflect change, but helps you move through it, too.

In capturing movement without rushing it, warmth without sentimentality, and connection without spectacle, Things Are Moving All Around Me stands as a quietly powerful reminder that growth doesn’t always announce itself – sometimes it simply keeps going, carrying us with it. Experience the full record via our stream below, and step inside Henry Grace’s creative world with Atwood Magazine as he goes track-by-track through the music and lyrics of his sweetly stirring sophomore album.

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:: stream/purchase Things Are Moving All Around Me here ::

:: connect with Henry Grace here ::

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Stream: ‘Things Are Moving All Around Me’ – Henry Grace

:: Inside Things Are Moving All Around Me ::

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Rust

This is one of the first songs I wrote for this album and I always hoped it might be the opener. It was tough to record though. The song wanted that trashy, live, band in the room sound and so we ended up scrapping the studio version and using a live recording we made for a studio film which inadvertently also became the music video. You can watch that here:

Moving On

This track has a real eighties vibe to it that I think caught us all a little by surprise when we were making the album. The original arrangement was much more folk orientated but, once we took my acoustic guitar out of the picture, the song assumed this whole new identity. It’s a great track 2 and I think takes the listener on a very different journey to ‘Rust.’

Say Something Mean

This was the first single from the album. We released it last summer, the week before we played Glastonbury. Before going on stage, I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Eavis which was a bit of a pinch me moment. This song will always take me back to that time – playing five shows in under 24 hours and sitting on the hill watching Neil Young sing ‘Rockin’ In The Free World.’

This Is The Place

To us, this felt like the most important song on the record to get right. Like most of the album, we were tracking everyone live in the room and we just got a really magic take with this song. So much so that if I had to give the rest away, it’s the one recording I’d keep. We recorded this song on the same day we were filming so, alongside ‘Rust’, we were able to document it all on camera. You can watch that here:

Things

This was the first song I wrote for the album. I wrote it one morning in my garden before work. It’s probably the most ambitious production on the record and mixing it was a real joy. I notice something different every time I listen to it.

Medicine

I remember we recorded a lot of takes of this song and finished for the day feeling like we hadn’t quite got it down. I remember when we listened back after dinner, we were all like ‘oh, this is actually kinda good.’ We overdubbed the ooo’s but everything else you hear is just the live take. I love this recording; the roominess of Toby’s kit; Tom’s bass playing; Blaine and Brian riffing off one another, it’s a nice way to start side 2.

California Rain

Kudos to Soren Bryce who helped engineer this record. She really took this song to another world with a Chase Bliss pedal while Brian’s guitar solo at the end still remains my favourite guitar solo on this album.

Passing Through

Like all the tracks on this album, I love listening to the band. If there’s a magic to this song, it’s in Brian’s guitar and Blaine’s steers as a producer. I think Dave Lynch deserve a mention too because he did a great job with the mix. I remember when we finished at Middle Farm, I wasn’t sure if this song would make it onto the record but it’s become one of my favourite songs to play live. So much so that we have started opening with it at shows.

Leaving Song

Credit to Blaine who co-produced this album as he really fought for this song during pre-production. Without him, I’m not sure we would have recorded it and I’m so glad we did. The middle eight section is, for me, one of my favourite arrangements on the record.

Days Like This

We recorded this song on our first day at Middle Farm. We’d spent the day trying and failing to record ‘Rust’ and tensions were high by the evening. We had some dinner, blew off some steam, and ended up tracking this song around some room mics in the middle of the night. Definitely one of the great moments making this record.

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:: stream/purchase Things Are Moving All Around Me here ::

:: connect with Henry Grace here ::

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 © Jess Bibby

Things Are Moving All Around Me

an album by Henry Grace