Grammy-winning Harry Styles collaborator Mitch Rowland will release his second album, Whistling Pie, on Sept. 12 through Styles’ Erskine Records/Giant Music. The banjo-flavored lead single “Really Ready” is based on an idea Rowland started back in 2017 and only rediscovered while deleting old videos from his phone.
As with his 2023 debut, Come June, the new 13-track album was produced with Rob Schnapf, who is best known for his work with the late Elliott Smith and Beck. It was largely recorded nearby Rowland’s remote English countryside home at the Welsh studio Rockfield, where Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” was once put to tape.
“Both records were written in the countryside, less so in cities,” he says. “Landscape and stillness are a huge part of why I wanted to pick up the guitar in the first place.”
For the past decade, Rowland has served as one of the guitarists in Styles’ band and has been an integral collaborator with the pop star as a co-writer of hits such as “Watermelon Sugar” and “Golden.” Their friendship and onstage interactions have been hyped by stans for years, but Rowland’s solo career only began coming into focus at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, when he finally hit the studio to finish all the half-completed ideas stored on his phone.
The folk-inspired, minimal sound of Come June “was a direct result of having two feet in the world of production with Harry, and for the last six or seven years, being able to chuck anything and everything into a song while working in the nicest places,” Rowland told SPIN in 2023.
