About six years ago, Jacob Alon was forced to start over. Heartbroken and artistically lost, having just dropped out of university, they became immersed in an Edinburgh folk community, where a group of ‘kind, beautiful outsiders’ encouraged the Dunfermline-raised artist to look inwards and start taking songwriting seriously.
Having plunged into a depression, Jacob roamed the Scottish capital’s streets most nights, eventually coming to the historic Captain’s Bar near the Royal Mile. The pub’s many characterful regulars nurtured Jacob back to health, and the latter’s fearlessness proved contagious. As they began to play ‘countless’ jam sessions on the local circuit, a life in music no longer felt out of bounds.
‘I’d buried so much of myself for so long, and I was living a life that made me deeply unhappy,’ Jacob recalls to M. ‘I realised that if I didn’t say some of the things that I needed to say, then it would kill me. I needed a way to understand how I was feeling. This group opened their arms to me and offered me a guitar.’
Jacob’s sumptuous 2025 debut LP In Limerence (produced by Fontaines D.C. and Wet Leg collaborator Dan Carey) touched on reinvention, queer magic, substance issues, grief and ruptured familial ties, earning a Mercury Prize nomination and widespread critical acclaim. Their pure, intimate vocals, exceptional storytelling, distinct artist identity and ability to find humour and optimism in almost everything has since taken Jacob to the mainstream. This year alone, they’ve appeared on The Graham Norton Show and scooped the BRITs’ Critics’ Choice prize, following in the footsteps of Adele, Florence + The Machine and Sam Fender.
Along the way, Jacob has become increasingly open about their imperfections, their melodic and lightly psychedelic folk songs often exposing emotional wounds rather than concealing them. They stare trauma in the face without flinching. Much of their work reflects the different selves they’ve had to inhabit: as an outsider, a non-binary person and a classically trained musician drawn equally to pop music.
'I have to remind myself and anyone that’s listening that it’s worthwhile to have ourselves in the world, and that our voices do matter.’
Even now, Jacob isn’t sure where this crossover moment truly began. ‘There’s so much that’s happened in my life and in the wider world in the past year that, sometimes, it almost feels like too much,’ they say. ‘I don’t even know where to start when it comes to talking about it all.’
When we speak over Zoom, Jacob is at home in Glasgow and playing catch-up after a few weeks of promotion. Wearing a T-shirt printed with artwork inspired by their song Liquid Gold 25, they pause often when reflecting on how quickly things have moved, pushing loose curls back from their face as they search for the right words.
For most of their early life, Jacob made music without any expectation of recognition. At secondary school, they remember gritting their teeth to get through the days, turning to music in order to escape the bullying they faced. Writing songs ‘from a place of silliness’ became a way to combat the ‘toxic masculinity and cruelness’ of pupils in the year above — often in the form of diss tracks.
‘When I was younger, songwriting was only ever something I’d thought of as a semi-ironic way to make people laugh,’ they explain. ‘There was a light-heartedness and a playfulness in the music that I still try to preserve to this day. Music was a way for me to get my power back, and it brought me so much joy when I needed it.’
Like their late, creatively ambidextrous heroes Nick Drake and David Bowie, Jacob has an uncanny ability to shapeshift. With fact and fiction woven into its ballads, In Limerence is populated by doomed lovers and disenfranchised teens. On tracks Elijah and Don’t Fall Asleep, Jacob’s lyrics drift between the mystical and the deeply personal, drawing loosely on their formative years.
Over time, Jacob stepped further out of the shadows and on to bigger stages. In 2024, they began performing at industry showcases like Eurosonic in Groningen and The Great Escape in Brighton, collecting a small but devout fanbase including key radio and press tastemakers. A deal with Island Records soon followed.
Jacob says they are now more alert to patterns from their youth whenever they resurface in their songwriting. There is also the risk of emotional overexertion, something that is especially difficult to manage while on the road. Performing with such openness night after night can be emotionally exhausting, and they are still learning how to protect their energy while giving audiences the vulnerability they expect.
‘It can feel really draining, having to revisit old memories while performing,’ they explain. ‘Some of my songs have taken on new meanings, which I think is the result of how difficult the world feels right now. I have to remind myself and anyone that’s listening that it’s worthwhile to have ourselves in the world, and that our voices do matter — even in the face of such depravity that makes us feel like we don’t count and it’s all hopeless.’
Raised by a single mother, Jacob does not come from a family of people who made money from art. In a post-Brexit landscape, current social and political inequities make choosing creative paths increasingly difficult for young artists, let alone for gender nonconforming people like Jacob, who has consistently spoken out against policies that restrict transgender people’s access to healthcare in the UK. It takes a certain kind of resolve to pursue your ambitions when the world around tells you to do the opposite.
For Jacob, live performance is an act of community building. At the Mercury Prize ceremony in Newcastle last October, they weaved a refrain of ‘free Palestine’ into a breathtakingly moving rendition of their song Fairy In A Bottle, their voice trembling. In Jacob’s hands, the spotlight became communal rather than individual, reaffirming their belief that music’s real power lies not in spectacle, but in shared feeling.
'At the Mercurys, I felt very inspired by what all of us held in that moment, the stillness in the room.'
Reflecting on that star-making night, Jacob remembers feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the performance and ‘trying not to fall apart’, before reaching a point halfway through where they could ‘just let go’.
‘I felt very inspired by what all of us held in that moment, the stillness in the room; that’s an example of such deep connection in a world that feels so fucked,’ Jacob tells M. ‘It made me believe a bit more that we can still come together.’
That same spirit of generosity and optimism is shaping Jacob’s mindset going forward. They hope to embrace a state of stillness and find a ‘fresh creative fire’ — a reset that feels both necessary and earned. After 12 months of momentum, saying ‘yes’ and moving at the speed opportunity demands, the intention now is to slow down long enough to hear what’s actually waiting beneath all the external noise.
It’s a perspective rooted in staying grounded. Jacob beams as they describe how several of their former teachers have reached out to them with words of pride and encouragement, while they are excited to perform a sold-out show at London’s Roundhouse in April, meeting their fans eye to eye in an in-the-round setting.
Before then, Jacob remains on a journey of making peace with their past. The outside world may be in a perilous state and Jacob says they have no idea when they’ll find time to finish album two, let alone truly switch off. But they close out our interview by quoting drag pioneer RuPaul, only half-joking: ‘If you can’t love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?’ At that, Jacob allows themselves a small, satisfied smile.
Jacob Alon will perform at Manchester's Band on the Wall later this week as part of 6 Music Festival 2026. You can see Jacob's upcoming tour dates here.
This article is taken from the latest issue of M Magazine, which you can read in full here.
