John Cale is on a formidable hot streak in his 80s. When the Welsh avant-garde legend released Mercy last year, it was his first album in a decade. But he’s already produced another gem with POPtical Illusion, a masterful tribute to his bleak imagination. Six decades into his career, Cale is making music with a renewed sense of urgency—he hit a creative turning point in the pandemic, in a frenzy where he wrote 80 songs in a year. Yet he’s reached one of the most adventurous phases in his ever-eccentric career

Part of Cale’s prolific boom comes from his realisation that he’s lost so many of his friends, peers, and collaborators in recent years. There’s obviously his old Velvet Underground comrade Lou Reed, while Mercy also had elegies mourning David Bowie and Nico. But it also comes from looking at the world falling apart around him. Nothing like an apocalypse to give an artist like Cale a blast of late-game inspiration

Once again, Cale presents us with challenging and accessible music. The album features heartfelt pop songs like ‘Davies and Wales‘, a testament to the desire to uplift others from past failures, juxtaposed with the foreboding ‘Calling You Out‘. Here, a circling acoustic guitar harmonises with a twinkling keyboard riff, while queasy effects and heavy beats, along with manipulated backing vocals, create an unsettling atmosphere

That uneasy sense of non-specific doom is never too far away, even if hidden below the surface

The splintered guitar and vicious hammer of the drums on “Shark-Shark” have an irresistible momentum, but amongst its cast of curious characters lurks someone named Cesar who “sharpens knives, in the back of the van”

Cale doesn’t try to recreate the magic of past work but rather mines it for inspiration and then holds it up to the scrutiny of the present, twisting what he extracts into new shapes informed by whatever his emotional reality is today. “Edge of Reason” quotes “Fear is a Man’s Best Friend”, but instead of reaching that song’s unhinged peak, it eases us towards an almost choral expression of hope

“How We See the Light” similarly sums up the album’s ethos beautifully: “Can I close another chapter/In the way we run our lives/More decisive in the future/Or deliberate in the end.” For Cale, this impulse for change isn’t a desperate attempt to reclaim his youth or heyday. Rather, POPtical Illusion embodies his curiosity, drive, and desire to explore uncharted territory while offering wisdom that can only be attributed to his age. Cale doesn’t seem to care about relevancy. He’s just looking to continue growing