British singer-songwriter Chris Selman examines the stranger pressures of contemporary life on Today’s Malaise, the new 12-track album from his Celestial Skies project.
Recorded with a live band and string players at Blueprint Studios in Manchester, then mastered at Abbey Road in London, the record pairs bright indie-pop arrangements with lyrics about phone dependency, influencer culture, political dysfunction, beauty standards and society’s appetite for instant solutions. Selman explains:
The new album is a social comment on the state of the world in 2026. I’m looking at the realities of living in 2026 — whether that’s phone addiction, influencer culture, broken politics, the beauty industry, our obsession with quick fixes and more besides.
Rather than matching those subjects with heavy-handed production, Celestial Skies uses melody, wit and live instrumentation to make the criticism land without flattening the songs into lectures.
The Lost Art of Concentration tackles shrinking attention spans and digital brain fog, while Cancel Culture looks at public rejection and modern avoidance. Reasons To Be Optimistic shifts the focus toward the smaller comforts that keep people moving through an exhausting news cycle.
The record’s technical character comes from that contrast. Full-band performances and strings give the songs warmth and movement, while Selman’s writing keeps pulling the listener back toward the increasingly artificial systems shaping everyday behaviour.
Selman divides his time between London and Manchester, where he continues to record with the musicians behind Celestial Skies. Alongside the project, he also performs with the London Gay Men’s Chorus.
With Today’s Malaise, Celestial Skies does not offer a grand solution to modern dysfunction. It documents the scrolling, posturing and political static with enough humour to make the diagnosis entertaining; which, frankly, is more useful than another motivational app.