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Antony Szmierek Announces Decoding Birdsong, His Collaborative Second Album
A heron, a pair of dice, a falling plane and a fibreglass Godzilla walk into a Manchester poet's second record.
Start with the imagery, because Antony Szmierek did. A heron. Dice. A plummeting airplane. A rerun of the Australian reality show Aussie Gold Hunters. A fibreglass replica of Godzilla. These are the pictures Szmierek has offered as the visual language of Decoding Birdsong, his sophomore album, and they read less like a mood board than a fortune-teller's junk drawer. That's the point. He's described the record as being "about choosing to believe in something," and an album built around luck, loneliness and the arbitrary weight we assign to signs needs exactly this kind of odd, specific iconography to make the idea stick.
Decoding Birdsong was announced on 6th May 2026 alongside the preview single "Chalk," with the full album due 21st August 2026, just 18 months after his debut, Service Station At The End Of The Universe. That's a fast turnaround for an artist who spent the interim period selling out rooms and headlining festival slots, which makes the album's central tension more interesting: this is introspective, dancefloor-ready material about luck and life changes, arriving at the exact moment Szmierek's own luck has visibly changed.
## Chalk, Chaos Theory, and the Win-or-Lose Music Industry
The lead single earns its title from snooker, specifically Ronnie O'Sullivan. Szmierek has explained "Chalk" is "about the idea that chalking a cue makes a marginal difference to the outcome - a metaphor for chaos theory and the win-or-lose nature of the music industry." It's a sharp way to frame a career built on small, deliberate adjustments rather than one big break: a former English teacher at a college for special needs students, quietly perfecting his cue action long before anyone was watching him play.
That patience paid off in public in 2023, when Szmierek was named 6Music's Artist of the Year off the back of his Poems To Dance To EP. His spoken-word-meets-dance-music approach has since drawn comparisons to Mike Skinner, Jarvis Cocker and John Cooper Clarke, a lineage of British voices who treat the mundane and the profound as the same material. Service Station At The End Of The Universe then did the rest of the convincing: Glastonbury, Jools Holland, repeat BBC airplay, sold-out shows across the UK and Europe, and, as recently as February 2026, closing out Solomun's Alexandra Palace shows in front of 20,000 people.
## Six Collaborators, Three Vinyl Formats, One Bonus Remix
Where the debut was a solo statement, Decoding Birdsong opens the door. Szmierek brings in Pretty Girl from Australia, London's Los Bitchos, Bristol producer 1-800 GIRLS, Imogen and the Knife, indie pop artist Ellur, and MAX RAD, a guest list that spans continents and genres rather than sticking to one scene. Paired with what's described as expansive, immersive production, it suggests a record built to sound bigger and less insular than its predecessor, even as the lyrics turn inward.
The physical release, out via Mushroom Music Group and distributed on vinyl by Integral Virgin Music Group B.V. (EAN 9341004149779), runs 13 tracks and roughly 46 minutes and 19 seconds. Collectors get three ways in: a Dinked Edition limited to 1,000 copies at £29.99, pressed in a blue-and-black "Marble Warble" colorway with a signed art card and a bonus 7-inch; an Indies Only Beak Yellow LP at £24.99; and a standard Black LP at £24.99. That bonus 7-inch is its own small event, pairing "Three Crystals" with a Los Bitchos remix of "Seminal," effectively handing one of the album's new collaborators a second, remixed appearance in the same package.
Put the pieces next to each other and a pattern emerges that has nothing to do with hype. A teacher who became an award-winning artist through repetition and small adjustments is now making an album literally named after decoding signs, fronted by a single about how marginal gains decide winners and losers, and backed by a collaborator list wide enough to double as a genre survey. Whether "Chalk" is a throwaway snooker reference or Szmierek's own thesis statement for how he's built a career, 21st August will be the first real test of the theory on record.
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