Videos

One True Pairing (Tom Fleming) releases new track “Mid-Life Crisis”

• 12th Feb 2024

Following the release of acclaimed single “Frozen Food Centre”, One True Pairing, aka Thomas Fleming, former Wild Beasts songwriter, vocalist and multi-instrumentalist, releases another John ‘Spud’ Murphy (Lankum, black midi, caroline) produced single, “Mid-Life Crisis”.

Propulsive, anthemic and blissfully raw, “Mid-Life Crisis” asks bigger questions about life, growing older and masculine pain. “I shuffle around, morning to morning, whistling to myself, just to remind myself I exist,” says Fleming. “Friendly, unthreatening. Ready to softly drift out of the story. Life is short. Life is long.”

The story of the song is beautifully captured in the accompanying video. Starring Marek Larwood (Murder in Successville), it follows the everyday trials and mundane misfortunes of one man in reverse. “We all believe we’re someone until the universe proves us otherwise,” Fleming reflects. “Marek perfectly captures this in his performance as a Thameslink suit who is able to find the absurd pitiful, then hilarious. You can laugh, sure, but it’s you too.”

Fleming will play his first live show in three years at an intimate London venue on 20th February. Fans can enter a competition for the chance to win a ticket to the show here.

Towards the end of 2023, Fleming released “Frozen Food Centre”, his first new music as One True Pairing since the release of his self-titled debut album in 2019. As with “Mid-Life Crisis”, the track was produced and mixed by John ‘Spud’ Murphy at Dublin’s Hellfire Studios and features Cormac MacDiarmada of Lankum. Released alongside a poignant short film directed by James Hankins (Richard Dawson), “Frozen Food Centre” was released to acclaim with The Quietus in an exclusive video premiere noting its “beautiful and elegiac” quality and The Guardian similarly praising Fleming’s “gorgeous” voice.

Fleming’s output has always looked at ideas around masculinity – the mournful, erotic music of Wild Beasts subverting accepted roles around young Northern men. Now older and wiser, his new music continues this theme from a place of newfound experience.