PREP

The members of PREP are expanding their circle. For the group’s sophomore album of slick pop gems, titled The Programme (out June 7th on Bright Antenna), they’ve enlisted a producer to help evolve their sound. With the guiding hand of the Latin Grammy-nominated Renaud Letang, acclaimed for his work with Feist, L'impératrice, and Benny Sings, PREP has concocted its smoothest, warmest sounding album yet. Anchored by the first single TK, The Programme is PREP at its most confident, showing off its sparkling taste through bold features and a bigger, near-anthemic sound—the result of playing bigger and bigger venues around the world.

The members of PREP—vocalist-lyricist Tom Havelock, keyboardist Llywelyn ap Myrddin, drummer Guillaume Jambel, and producer-guitarist Dan Radclyffe—began writing The Programme in London in 2023. Though the group initially started with the intention of exploring the world of ‘70s and ‘80s American R&B and soft rock through a contemporary lens, in the ensuing years PREP honed a sound that was unmistakably theirs. The formation of this singular style allowed them to cover Harry Styles’s smash hit “As It Was” and make it sound like PREP. (Tens of millions of plays and YouTube comments like “this makes Harry's version sound like a cover” can’t be wrong.) Now, they decided, it was time to step out of the comfortable sandbox they’d built.

Renaud’s outsider perspective helped the guys to solve older material they’d never quite figured out. The bright and reflective “One Track Life,” an instant standout on The Programme, dates back to sessions for PREP’s first album. But they couldn’t get it to a place where every member of the group believed in it, so the track languished—until now. “We’d ended up making the song too complicated,” Tom explains, “and Renaud stripped it back. He got us to stay minimal on the chorus, rather than pad it out with too many sounds.”

The result of this judicious collaboration is a timeless record with cosmopolitan flair. Its many guests—cult musician Eddie Chacon, Thai star Phum Viphurit, dreamy LA singer-songwriter Vicky Farewell, and Montreal keyboardist Anomalie—capture the band’s expansive sensibility. Eddie connected with PREP during a Los Angeles sojourn, where they’d gone to finish the album. He arrived at the studio with a melody that came to him during his drive over, and they wrote the near-tropical “Call It” on the spot—before toasting with glasses of tequila.

And Phum they met in Bangkok while on tour (PREP has a long history of collaborating with Asian artists), where despite feeling exhausted from the road, Tom and the Thai vocalist began working from a beat of Dan’s to great effect. The sturdy, chilled-out “Getaway” is classic PREP, a bittersweet ode to independence in a relationship, made more lovely by Phum’s soft voice.

Though it’s only PREP’s sophomore album, The Programme feels like a capstone to a musical project that began as an experiment and grew into a globetrotting phenomenon with a fully realized aesthetic. The evolution is clear—an epic song like “Last Plane Out,” with its stadium-sized, Phil Collins-esque sense of scale, would not have made sense on previous PREP releases. This is the moment where PREP ascends to the next level of international acclaim.