Antony Szmierek has a knack for making everyday things feel strangely
important. A pool hall. A cue ball. A small piece of chalk. In his new single,
“Chalk”, those familiar objects become part of a bigger question about luck,
choice and what happens when life slips outside your control.
This
one is a lead single from Szmierek's new album, Decoding Birdsong, following
the success of 2025’s Service Station at the End of the Universe. That record
pushed the former English teacher into a much bigger world, taking him from
Glastonbury and Jools Holland to sold-out shows across the UK and Europe, with
BBC radio continuing to pick up his work.
His rise has been
anything but conventional. Szmierek was working at a college for students with
special educational needs when his mix of spoken word and electronic dance
music began finding an audience. His EP, His Poems To Dance To, helped earn
him 6 Music’s Artist of the Year in 2023. Since then, the rooms have grown.
“Chalk”
takes its idea from an unlikely source: Ronnie O’Sullivan’s snooker
documentary, The Edge of Everything. Szmierek became interested in the tiny
act of chalking a cue before a shot. It barely changes anything, yet players
do it because it gives them a feeling of control.
That small ritual
became a metaphor for the music business. You can prepare. You can make the
right move. You can play your best shot. The result can still go somewhere
else entirely.
The music has some of that dark, stalking quality, built around
hypnotic electronics. With them, Szmierek delivers his words in his deadpan
style, with a calm, almost emotionless, matter-of-fact tone. His lyrics move
between surreal images from the pool hall, such as a tangerine containing an
eight ball and God wearing a waistcoat, before shifting into thoughts about
luck, chance and whether we really have control over what happens to us.
While
the music brings the night-out energy, it wraps words that keep circling
uncertainty. Szmierek’s thinking here is that anyone can encounter a crisis,
but getting safely through it is another matter, and he seems more interested
in what you do when the outcome remains uncertain.
He injects the
feeling of being on the edge, leans over the principle of cause and effect,
but also optimistically holds on to the possibility that the next shot could
become a breakthrough. There’s a defiant streak in it too. Losing after giving
everything can feel better than playing it safe and never finding out what
might have happened.
This idea fits Szmierek’s own story rather
well. A former teacher making spoken-word dance music could have stayed a
niche curiosity. Instead, he’s here turning a snooker ritual into a song about
risk with sound that makes you work on a dance floor.