James Ellis Ford’s ‘Lost In Another World,’ recorded during leukaemia treatment, turns illness into a radiant synth-pop diary
Some albums are made under pressure. James Ellis Ford‘s second solo record was made under something closer to siege. “Lost In Another World,” out August 14 via Domino, was written and recorded in just over two weeks in early 2025, while Ford lay in a bed at London’s St Bartholomew’s Hospital between punishing rounds of chemotherapy for acute myeloid leukaemia, an aggressive cancer with a survival rate of roughly 30 percent. Given that origin, the most astonishing thing about these 12 tracks of synth-pop, electronic growls and sentimental ’80s cutaways is not their darkness but their light.
Ford is one of British music’s great behind-the-board fixers, the producer who has sharpened records by Arctic Monkeys, Depeche Mode, Fontaines D.C., Blur, Pulp and Gorillaz, alongside his own work in Simian Mobile Disco and The Last Shadow Puppets. His 2023 solo debut “The Hum” was a genre-hopping showcase, and he initially imagined its follow-up as something grander, with string sections and involved arrangements. Illness rewrote that plan entirely. He asked his wife to bring a laptop and a microphone to the ward, and worked with whatever fit on a foldable IKEA table.
A Diary Without Filters
That constraint became the album’s method. Ford has described how illness stripped away his usual defenses, telling NME that in a vulnerable state, “all of my filters were just non-existent.” He wrote without trying to shroud anything in poetry, and the record reads like a diary of unfiltered thought, each song a direct transmission from inside the storm. The results are startlingly poppy given the circumstances. Opening single “Overtones“ pulls the listener in with warm, synth-driven momentum, its muffled autotuned vocals inspired by vintage Ryuichi Sakamoto, Yellow Magic Orchestra and Susumu Yokota.
The record shares more than its themes with a rare and haunting lineage, the album made in a hospital. It sits alongside J Dilla’s “Donuts” and Warren Zevon’s “The Wind” as a document of creation under mortal threat. Tracks like “I Believe In You” and “Parallel Dimension” exhale a strange serenity, which Ford has credited to the ward’s calm. It is tempting to hear the beeps of hospital machinery bleeding into the record’s space-like effects, and if the album had a genre of film, it would be sci-fi, an impression driven almost entirely by the synth work.
Radiant Regardless
For all its optimism, “Lost In Another World” never flinches from where it came from. The six-minute closer “This Will All Be A Memory Soon” finds Ford reciting, “now I’m losing my hair, which just doesn’t seem fair, did I do something bad, made the universe mad?” It is a gut-punch precisely because the surrounding music refuses despair. “The Ever After” brings a groovy, surreal zest, as if Ford had teleported from his catalogue of swampy tape-loop experiments to somewhere far from needles and nausea.
What makes the album more than a survival story is how fully it functions as music. Ford recently oversaw the star-studded War Child charity compilation “Help(2),” a reminder that his instincts as a curator and craftsman never left him, even here. “Lost In Another World” is proof that those instincts run deeper than circumstance. Whether made in a hospital bed, a million-dollar studio or an abandoned warehouse, it is raw, rare and radiant, regardless of the world one is lost in. That Ford emerged from that bed with an album this luminous is its own quiet miracle.
