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JP Cooper VibeZ

JP Cooper has one of those voices that makes strangers turn around in a bar. Twenty-eight tracks of a Manchester singer who took the long road and kept the grit.

Manchester soul, weathered properly

John Paul Cooper grew up in Middleton, Greater Manchester, in a family where his father was a preacher — which is the standard origin story for a certain kind of gospel-inflected voice, and in his case it holds. He spent years on the independent circuit releasing EPs before "Perfect Strangers" with Jonas Blue in 2016 gave him a global dance hit, followed by "September Song," which became the record most people know him by.

What is interesting about Cooper is the tension between those chart moments and the rest of his catalogue. The hits are polished, tightly written pop-soul. The album tracks are rougher and more folk-adjacent — acoustic guitar, close harmony, an unaffected northern English delivery that owes as much to singer-songwriter tradition as to soul.

What to listen for

"September Song" and "Perfect Strangers" are the ones you know. "Passport Home" and "All This Love" are the ones you should know — both stronger songs, both built on the rasp at the top of his range.

"The Only Reason" and "Mercy" lean gospel. "Too Close" and "Talking To Strangers" lean folk. "Sing It With Me" with Astrid S is the most straightforwardly lovely thing here.

The covers are a genuine highlight and worth seeking out deliberately: "Walking On Sunshine" reimagined as something almost mournful, "Let It Be," and a version of Billie Eilish's "everything i wanted" that finds a completely different centre of gravity in the song.

The features show how in-demand that voice is: Bugzy Malone's "Ordinary People," Sleepwalkrs' "Goodnight," Emily Burns' "Is It Just Me?" and the R3HAB/VIZE dance cut "Jet Plane."

Twenty-eight tracks. Start with the covers, stay for the album tracks.

Go deeper

Raised Under Grey Skies (2017) is the album, and the title tells you what it is — northern English soul with the weather in it. She (2020) is the more ambitious follow-up.

For the British soul lineage he sits in, Michael Kiwanuka is the obvious peer — another artist with a gospel-adjacent voice working in a folk-soul register — and his Love & Hate is one of the best British albums of the last decade. Rag'n'Bone Man shares the blues weight; James Bay the songwriting approach.

And if the gospel undertow is what caught you, go back to Sam Cooke with the Soul Stirrers and Bill Withers — the two singers most obviously in his DNA.

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