Cupid’s Bow is the 2nd single from Alexander’s debut solo album Polari out early next year and it has a thumpingly muscular bassline courtesy of Dua Lipa producer Danny L. Harle that takes aim and hits its dancefloor bullseye.

• Read on for reasons including how to see Alexander on his 2025 European tour including at London’s Palladium

The lyric is far less decisive however and has Alexander pondering: ‘You’ve done something to me and I love the way it feels. But, maybe, I just don’t know what I want and it’s too good to be true but I love the way it feels.’

Polari the album is out 7 February 2025 and Alexander says: ‘I probably first heard the word Polari about 15 years ago when I was a newly out homosexual, I knew it was some kind of ‘lost gay language’ but I didn’t take too much interest in gay history back then, looking to the past felt difficult.

‘‘Polari’ was a gay relic that I put alongside hanky codes, secret handshakes and Edna Everage. 10 years later I would play Ritchie in It’s A Sin and get to grapple with my gay identity in a way that totally transformed my life.

‘I loved learning about queer history so much, it gave me a new way to understand myself. Now after more than a decade of releasing music as Years & Years, I’m about to release my first album under my own name. I asked myself… what is an Olly Alexander album? If I wanted to distil the purest essence of whatever it is inside of me, I needed to try something new.’

1st solo single Dizzy was a song of the month for us in March and finished a disappointing 18th in 2024’s controversial Eurovision but we think Alexander should hold his head up high because it was a brilliant staging of a good song performed well.

Perhaps it was too uncompromisngly gay to ever find mainstream success at a pan-European music show that for the UK at least has an 8pm start time but it serves as the perfect calling card for a newly solo artist finding their feet and setting the stage for their 1st album.

We see Alexander in April 2025 at the Palladium and check out the tickets link below for the opportunity to check out Polari live in Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester and Bristol as well as in countries including Germany, France, Switzerland and Ireland.

• Main pictures via Facebook courtesy Olly Alexander Tickets
• Have you seen an Olly Alexander show before and what did you think of this song? Let us know what you thought in the comments below
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