Label Description: Local Action is proud to present ‘Loving (Pullman Close)’, the new album by BFTT.

BFTT has been a key cog in Manchester’s underground for years now. A founding member of the city’s Mutualism collective and record label (other Mutualism members and alumni include Jennifer Walton, Clemency and Iceboy Violet), he’s also a resident at Sunday Club, Finn’s house and garage-focused day party at The White Hotel, and co-founded the YCO label with aya. In short, he’s a long-suffering dance music lifer – the sort of figure that we naturally gravitate to after years of sinking our own time and money into labels and club nights. There’s plenty of connecting threads between the artists that we’re drawn to at Local Action, but sheer dedication to the cause is an underrated one. Find the others, you know?

The follow-up to 2022’s debut album ‘Redefines’ – though he’s released singles on YCO, DJ Python’s Worldwide Unlimited and more in the time since – ‘Loving’ finds BFTT exchanging that album’s razor-sharp sound design for a gauzier sound palette. The full-bodied devotion of vocal house and garage is a clear influence, but this album often finds him stretching that source material to breaking point, creating hypnotic, collage-style ambient passages. More than the form though, it’s the feel that makes ‘Loving’ the album it is: late night, romantic music; lost moments washed in a Thaemlitzian pastel.

“I feel like there’s quite a big change in production approach”, BFTT explains. “Previously I’d labour over sound design for months … and while this album is still detailed in places, I’ve certainly taken a bigger brush to it.”

As we say, this is a deeply romantic record – in terms of its conception and its source material. In BFTT’s words, “there’s a key theme of falling in love and working out what love looks like for me.” And without self-snitching too much, many of the album’s samples reflect that – declarations of love and dedication from the ether. “I love the way that a lot of house and garage vocal samples openly declare love so upfront”, he explains. Appropriately, the album was unintentionally bookmarked by Ryan’s own relationship: he started making it in 2022, the same year he met his fiancee, and finished writing the music in 2025, the year they got engaged.

Although it’s an album that deals in smeared brushstrokes, it’s also music that feels tangible and situated in a physical space. It’s no coincidence that much of the inspiration for the album’s sound came from BFTT’s residency at Sunday Club, hearing classic house and garage echo between the walls of the White Hotel. “All sampling is predominantly of records I’ve been digging for and playing at Sunday Club over the past two and a bit years. That venue and that party certainly hold massive influence over the album. Finn’s insatiable passion for these records is impossible not to get drawn into if you hang around with him for long enough!” 

• Written, produced and mixed by BFTT
• Mastered by Alex Gordon
• Artwork by Pandaemonium
• Photography by Hats