Some time in the past half-decade or so, Jam City passed a "point of no return." The occasion was his first session producing for another vocalist. "I could never go back from that," says the London-based Jack Latham now. And he didn't: he has since pursued a career as a producer and songwriter, racking up credits across the pop spectrum, from Kelela to Troye Sivan.

Collaboration, and the openness—to people, ideas, accidents—that it requires, seem central to Latham's music-making. It might be this openness that took him beyond the club community that shaped him. In 2012's Classical Curves, Latham made one of the definitive documents of this scene. But from there he took a series of unexpected turns. 2015's Dream A Garden pivoted to tender songcraft, looking through a scuffed '80s lens at a despondent post-crash world. Last year's Pillowland was something else again, pairing the technicolour bombast of '70s glam rock and psych with the gleeful mutations of '20s pop.

Pillowland's sound is unique. Its retro aspects—chorus, sheen and warmth, yowling guitars, glam rock swagger—are lovingly rendered. (Latham is a keen student of pop's past eras, and enjoys reverse engineering the classics). The crisp, rounded songs and punchy vocals show how far his songwriting has come since 2015. But the record's motor is giddy futurism, and Latham uses modern production techniques to dazzle and destabilise.

As with everything Jam City, the album takes a step onto uncertain ground while keeping a firm grasp on the canon. When talking production, Latham describes striking a balance between the comfortable and the unfamiliar: whether it's in the way his setup prompts new approaches, or the trade-off between spontaneity and fine-grained perfectionism in his solo and collaborative work.

Speaking via video chat from his home studio in North London, an attic space with a view of the Emirates Stadium, Latham broke down his signature effect chains and expounded on his sound design "religion." He started by giving a tour of his fairly no-frills setup: a laptop, a guitar and pedalboard, and a few synths.

What synths have you got there?

That's the Korg Poly-800. There's a Behringer Deepmind under there. The [ARP] Odyssey. Fender Rhodes, a Machinedrum. And then a little guitar corner here. Four guitars [laughs]. And the amp, a Fender Twin copy. It's a home setup, so it's kind of modest. I've always had home studios. Any serious work, like mixing or sessions, happens somewhere else. But I'm now realising there's bit of gear in here.

It's more than I expected. I'd read that you used to just use just the laptop and a MIDI keyboard. So it has expanded.

It's expanded. 90 percent of it is just laptop. And I try to keep up to date with plug-ins. But in the last year, really—a little bit before lockdown, but it definitely intensified because of lockdown—I invested a little bit more in gear. Mainly because of the guitar, but then getting a few synths and stuff. Mainly to trick myself into not looking at a screen while working. It's not so much that any of these things sound any better than what you can get on a computer. It's more that I almost come up with better ideas when I can't record immediately. If I'm just sat with a guitar or something. Because the whole process is slower, I try a bit harder, basically.

You've got everything nicely in reach. When setting up, were you thinking about what's most comfortable for the way you work? Or the opposite—trying to take yourself out of your comfort zone?

It's a mix of both really. In sessions, if I'm working with someone else, it's all my laptop, and I have a bunch of trusted presets that I know and love. Like, if it's a pad it's a Juno, if it's a drum machine it's an 808, or whatever. And I can just bring them up like that [clicks fingers], and there's no faffing around. That gets the song out pretty quickly. But in here, it's all within reach for sure, but at the same time, I could go over to my little guitar corner here and sit cross-legged facing the amp and zone out a little bit. So it's a mix of having both: knowing how to get sounds, while still leaving the door open for random little accidents.

How important is feedback from others in the creative process? Do you play works-in-progress to people, and if so, at what point?

The best feedback you could ever get is playing something to someone who's not even that familiar with the context. Because you can just feel that immediately, there's either a kind of a chill in the room [laughs] or there's an energy there where you're like, "Oh yeah, I've nailed it." So I think it's really important. And it's hard, I'm not gonna lie. A lot of the time I'm like, "Just give me one more day on this, then I'll play you this mix." But you've got to do it at some point in the process. My records are never finished until I play my girlfriend the final draft. And judging on that reaction, I'll know whether it's finished or not.

Has working more with other people given you a tougher shell in terms of taking feedback?

For my own music, it's still hard to play it to people I'm close to. But with other people, it's instant. If we're sitting in the studio together and I'm playing someone beats or ideas, you just know immediately if something isn't working or it is. And you're right, that's made it a little easier in a way, because then it's really no big deal if someone doesn't like an idea, or has a better idea. It's just whatever a song needs. So I think that has been a help, to be less precious about things. And I fundamentally like sharing my music with people, I like talking about the process as it's going on. Once you get past that initial barrier. Like when I first started working with other artists, five or six years ago now, there was definitely that initial, "Be gentle!" But now, I'm lucky because I can go to those people who I've worked with who I trust musically and be like, "What's missing?," or, "Is this done? I think this is done." And I trust their opinion.

Was the album made mostly this year?

It was the end of last year and the start of this year. I [mostly] finished it before lockdown, and I was mixing it with Liam Howe, who I've worked with before on a bunch of stuff. He's my mix engineer, but he's kind of my executive producer almost, in the sense that I trust his ear a lot. He did Dream A Garden and this one. So we did that together, and then I finished mixing it in lockdown by myself. I work quickly, but on my own records it does take a bit of time to develop ideas.

What was your routine like when working on it?

It's always different really. There are a couple of songs on the record that are three years old, though they sound very different now. Some of them went through multiple drafts, other ones came about very quickly. It's always about striking that balance. I try to keep more or less nine-to-five hours. I try not to work on weekends but I normally do. One thing that doing this music stuff for the amount of time I've been doing it has taught me, is that things will always get finished, but you do have to work at it in a way that's kind of unpleasant sometimes. It should always be fun but it's not always fun, and that's fine. Just boring, almost admin-like work.

Like, I'm working on this thing for an artist at the moment, and the song's written and it sounds amazing, her vocal sounds amazing. But part of what I'm doing is piecing together what we did in the session on the day and methodically going through it. There are some guitars in it but they're out of time, there are some drums that need to be moved slightly, there's like 100 takes of a Rhodes piano. There's a certain pride and joy in doing all that stuff, but it's not the eureka moment necessarily. But it's necessary. With the last record, the songs were written in an hour or so, but then it's weeks and months fine-tuning things and getting it to the right place. But I've learnt that you always get to the finish line eventually.

It's interesting that you're slipping between talking about your solo stuff and talking about your work with other people. Are there aspects of the two processes that are really different, or is it all the same?

I think actually, when it comes down to it, they're very similar. The core of the song or the core of the track gets written very quickly, then there's a kind of fine-tuning process, that kind of labour. I wouldn't say that I spend any less time on my own work compared to other people's work or vice versa. The music's very different, but it's the same process ultimately.

It would be nice to get into some detail about the sounds that went into the album. In particular, the signal chains you used on the guitar and voice. There's something very '70s, but also very hyped-up about them. Let's start with the guitar. What kind of things were you doing with it?

Ok amazing, I love this stuff. So: full nerd mode now. I'm not a guitar head at all, but I love them, and it's hard not to want to collect them. I used a 12-string on most of Pillowland, it's a '70s Japanese brand called Kyoto which is just beautiful. That's the '70s right there, that's David Bowie or Fleetwood Mac or whatever, it's just got that sound and cuts straight through the mix. To me, that's what the record is. The jangly sound of the guitar, but taken to another, much heavier place. But this is kind of the main one, a cheap Fender Strat. It does everything that it's meant to, it's super comfortable to play. Everything goes straight into the UAD Apollo Twin MKII [audio interface]. I don't really amp stuff that much, even though I love to. Noise concerns.

So the guitar sounds like this [plays a few chords]. So that's just a Strat with a bunch of chorus on it, going into a Marshall ED-1 compressor I've had for years, then the Strymon Moebius chorus and an Electro-Harmonix Cathedral Reverb. And then, it's a really nice fuzz: the Death By Audio Supersonic Fuzz Gun. Then I've got a little cheap Joyo preamp pedal that I've used for drum machines actually—if you put a drum machine through it, it's super punchy. Then I'll always put [the guitar] through [Soundtoys] Echoboy on the laptop. And also the Strymon Timeline. Everything goes through the Timeline or Echoboy basically. They do kind of the same job.

[The amp is] this Fender Twin copy. It's a beautiful amp, and if you play a synth through it, it's really cool as well. I had this epiphany a while ago, that every single sound that I love in recorded music is a combination of amping and echo. That's basically just my religion when it comes to sound design, those two things in conjunction. And not like wishy-washy, echo-y ambient tails, but really tight, short echo times and high feedback and saturation. That creates the kind of bathroom-y sound. It sounds like the instrument's uncomfortably close. [Plays some sharp chords on the guitar]. It's that kind of thing. Super short time, super small room sound, or a really short delay, like a millisecond delay. It's just the right amount of unpleasant. I just love it.

When amping and running stuff through pedals, you're forced to commit to your decisions. You can't hit undo later, as you can on a laptop. How do you navigate that?

Well, I never undo stuff. When I was using a laptop, I didn't do it anyway. But you're absolutely right, it makes such a difference to the identity of the song and what you're trying to do when you commit to something. I think there was a Brian Eno quote about always printing the echo and the reverb when you're recording something. And I fully agree with that. Also, when you try and recreate it, you never get the same thing. Oh my god, the amount of times I've tried to re-record a really shitty guitar thing that I've done on a VoiceNote, or recorded in the room that day. And it's just like, why are we bothering? It sounded great up until now, we just decided it needed to be a little bit tweaked. It's just like, no. You don't get to choose [laughs]. That's just the song. And that's another thing about the gear that helps me, it takes a lot of thought out of the whole process and it's more just about feeling. I've wasted enough time in my life trying to tweak sounds and thinking, "Oh, this should be a little more toppy" or whatever. If it sounds good when you're doing it then just print it and you're stuck with it. If it's not right, just write another song where it is right [laughs].

How about the vocals on the album? Were those recorded at home?

I did those at home, after many different attempts. I'm actually really proud of this—all the vocals on the record are done with the [Shure] SM58. I have a condenser mic, but first of all it's really impossible to record proper professional vocals in this room, because the boiler's here and the floorboards are really creaky. So I always use dynamic mics in this room. And I think something about holding it, having it hand-held, feels nice. I have a [Shure] SM7 as well, I use that for other artists, but for me there's something about the metal grill of the SM58. It doesn't make you sing better, but I just feel better when I'm singing. And that is important.

So, the mic goes through this DBX 286s preamp/compressor, it's pretty standard, I'll punch the gain up a little bit. Then I'll run it through the UAD 1176 Compressor. I also use Waves CLA Vocals all the time for vocals in sessions because it does everything right out the box. Then I'll add a UAD Pultec EQ to brighten it, maybe another CLA-2A [compressor] for glue in the main mix. I'll put a de-esser on the end. Then for drive, I use the [saturation knob on the] Echoboy a lot, or even natural overdrive from the DBX. So there'll be a lot of saturation on there. And then, yeah, Auto-Tune. Just a punchy, kind of rock & roll vocal. Like a punk vocal or something. It punches through the mix, that's all I really wanted vocally on this record.

That struck me, compared to Dream A Garden: the vocals moved from being in the middle distance to being right upfront. Aside from mix decisions, did you change the way you were singing? Did you get more confident?

I took singing lessons for a while. And I don't think there was a noticeable improvement necessarily but it really opened my eyes to how the voice works. Working with other people as a producer [too]. It made me understand how the diaphragm works, how breath control works. Also my ears have got better over the years. With Dream A Garden, pretty much all the vocals on that are stacked. There'll be three stacked unison vocals for the lead, there weren't really any harmonies on it. With this one, there aren't really any overdubs at all. I almost wanted the vocals to do the job that a synth would do. Like a monosynth, the ARP or whatever, it just cuts through a mix. And I was thinking about the vocals in the same way: they need to cut through everything, because why bother singing [otherwise]? With Dream A Garden it was slightly different, they were this ethereal presence. But with Pillowland it's just cutting through the mix, making the point.

Having worked with other singers in, I imagine, some pretty professional scenarios, have you learned something from the way vocals are handled in those settings?

Yeah, definitely. I learned so much from getting in the room with other people. Most of the time when I work with other people there'll be scratch vocals for writing the song, but then they'll redo them with their favoured studio or whatever. But sometimes no. I did a record for this rapper Killy, and Jasmine Chen did the vocal engineering on that record. It was a very chaotic session, in a fun way. And certain bars that he had were just vocal-ese, like filling in the blanks. And it was the last piece of the puzzle, to finish that song for his record, that he wanted to come up with words for [those parts]. And then at the 11th hour we just ended up using the nonsense, the gibberish takes, for a couple of bars in the record. Because they were just right. I kind of love it when that happens.

But yeah, I think the biggest thing for me is working with vocal engineers. Working with other vocal engineers has been an education for me, seeing how they approach things. They really are the smartest people in the industry [laughs], I have a lot of respect for them. I'm a producer, musician and writer, I'm not a vocal engineer. But I'm an apprentice and I've learned a lot over the years.

Your music often makes very clear references to certain styles or eras, but it doesn't get overwhelmed by its influences. The results are always original. When you're working on something, how conscious are those influences? I hear glam rock on the album, for instance. Were you thinking, "I want a glam rock beat," or did it come out incidentally?

One thing that Liam and I talked a lot about when we were finishing this record was studying the conventions before you try and write a piece of music in that style. I never want to rip anyone off, or create something that's derivative. I think a lot can be said for trying to emulate and recontextualise in your own way. Like, "I want to make a glam rock record, but I'm gonna make it with the Machinedrum," or, "I'm going to bring it into the future somehow." But one thing I learnt on this record was that you have to learn the basics of the genre before you do it. One fun thing I've been doing recently is trying to emulate the music I like, in a very traditional way. I'd never put it out, but as a little exercise in the morning I'll try and re-record a song as best as I can. To figure out how they did it.

With glam rock, on Pillowland, I was listening to a lot of those productions and being like, "All these songs have these types of chord progressions in common, and the bass is often doing this, and the guitars sit on this side of the mix and the vocals have this, like, John Lennon-y, short reverb, slap kind of thing going on." So let's do that, let's literally just copy that word for word. And then once we've got that, a kind of authentic-sounding glam rock song, we can be like, "Right, now it's time to get out Omnisphere, now it's time to take it to a new place."

I've been trying to do this with strings, doing these kind of Isaac Hayes, soulful string arrangements. [Plays a snippet of music off the laptop] This to me isn't necessarily the end result, but it's trying to emulate something in the best way possible. And then once we've got that we can take it somewhere else. That's how I'm thinking about influences at the moment. I think in the past I was just like, "Yeah man, I'm gonna do like a post-punk record with only FM synths," or something [laughs]. That's cool, but taking a more methodical approach is where I'm at at the moment, and it's yielding slightly more satisfying results.

Your albums each communicate a very clear set of ideas. At what stage does that stuff start to come in?

It comes at the very end, always. I might have a little mood board or whatever, but it doesn't really make any sense until that last minute when you have to be like, "This is it, submit it, and this is what it's gonna be to the world." And that's when you know you've got a record that deserves to be released, I think.

I do think that if the events of this year hadn't happened in the way that they had, it wouldn't have brought the whole process [of Pillowland] into focus in the way that it did. For me [the record] started out in some ways being about isolation and loneliness, but also the things that you do to escape that: the drug-like cult of music, or music fandom, that helps you make sense of yourself and your place in the world and your situation's shortcomings, if that makes sense. And then suddenly, March, April this year, that all gets brought into focus. Because it closed in my world—as it did all of us—to the point where I was in many ways inhabiting this character of an obsessive teenage music fan staring at the posters on their wall and dreaming of a life beyond their immediate surroundings, their hometown. That helped me finish the record. And now I feel like the record doesn't make quite as much sense in a world that isn't 2020. I'm not saying that I'm grateful for this fucking terrible pandemic, at all [laughs]. But yeah, it brought things into focus at the last minute.

In other interviews you've emphasised that you don't have much formal musical training. The thought I had was that your art school background has given you a different set of techniques: in terms of how to incorporate concepts into art, how to communicate ideas and connect things together. Music heads who know their scales don't necessarily have that.

Exactly, that's my advantage over all those people [laughs]. Another thing I'd say is: one thing about doing work with other people, doing sessions, is that I've also now got access to amazing keyboard players and amazing guitar players, and I can bring them in when I need them. I like doing things myself, and I take pride in my playing, and try and take it seriously and work at it. With Pillowland, I think I did need to do it all myself. But it's liberating getting to a stage where you think, "Actually I don't always have to do that."

It's a lot, as well, to produce your own record that you're singing on. I wouldn't recommend it [laughs]. You've got to be really careful not to get completely lost in the process, and not make bad decisions because you feel insecure. I feel a bit more freed up now, in that my job is really to just write the music and come up with the ideas. And I can implement that in any way I like. Sometimes it's OK, it's enough, to have the idea, and then have the network or the abilities to have other people come in and help realise that.

I'm just trying to trick myself into getting into scenarios where I can make a different kind of record because I have access to people whose skills are way beyond my own. And that's why I like working with other artists and other singers. Something happened to me when I first heard someone do a vocal to one of my beats, and I could never go back from that. It was kind of a point of no return, where I was like, "Oh wow, I didn't know it was this, I didn't know it sounded like this." [The music] ends up completely different, unexpected and beautiful and unanticipated, when someone else comes into the picture. And increasingly that's way more exciting to me than being like, "Here's my concept for the record, here are my tried and trusted techniques about what works production-wise." It all becomes a bit static. I think that's exciting for me, to have other people come in and kind of mess it up a little bit.