Some artists take a winding path to the stage and you can hear every twist of it in the music. Jacob Alon grew up in Dalgety Bay, a small town on the Fife coast, learned piano and guitar as a kid, and then went off to study theoretical physics and medicine at the University of Edinburgh — a genuinely strange runway for a folk singer, until you actually sit with In Limerence and realise the precision is exactly the point. Alon dropped out to chase music instead, and on the evidence of the last eighteen months, that was the correct call.
The breakthrough single was “Fairy In A Bottle,” released in 2024, a song that carries itself with the hushed intensity of someone who’s been writing in private for years and has finally decided to let people in. It found its way onto Later… with Jools Holland, still one of the few UK stages that can turn a niche artist into a genuine talking point overnight, and from there the momentum never really let up. By May 2025, Alon had a full debut album out, In Limerence, produced by Dan Carey, whose fingerprints (Fontaines D.C., Wet Leg, Squid) tend to show up on records that end up mattering. This one did.
Alon writes and performs as a non-binary artist, and lives with Tourette syndrome, both facts that matter not because they’re a hook, but because they shape the specificity of the songwriting. There’s a rawness to In Limerence that comes from someone who has clearly had to fight to be heard exactly as they are, and folk music, with its long tradition of testimony and confession, turns out to be precisely the right vessel for that. British GQ put it best, calling Alon’s work “a queer magic to folk music”, and once you’ve heard the record, that description stops sounding like a headline and starts sounding like the only accurate way to say it.
The recognition since has been the kind most artists wait a full career for. In Limerence was shortlisted for the 2025 Mercury Prize, longlisted for the Scottish Album of the Year Award, and Alon was named BBC Introducing’s Artist of the Year — the first Scottish artist ever to take that title. Then, this February, came the big one: Alon won the Brit Awards’ Critics’ Choice, an award with a genuinely serious track record of picking future headliners (Adele, Florence and the Machine, Celeste all won it on their way up). Alon described the win as leaving them “floating,” which tracks, it’s the sort of validation that changes how quickly a room fills up for your next show.
And the shows have followed. 2025 brought a Glastonbury debut and support slots with Olly Alexander and Kae Tempest, pairings that make sense once you hear how comfortably Alon moves between tenderness and theatricality. A Graham Norton Show appearance in February put the songs in front of a Saturday-night audience that folk records rarely reach. The 2026 tour dates now stretch well beyond the UK — Amsterdam, Berlin, Paris, and a run through North America taking in San Francisco, LA, Chicago and Brooklyn, which is a genuinely ambitious circuit for an artist barely two years into a public career.
What makes Alon worth your actual attention, rather than just your algorithm’s, is that none of the accolades have pushed the music toward anything safer. The songs are still small in the ways that matter, a voice, a guitar, a room that feels close even through headphones, while the story around them has gone enormous. That gap between the scale of the recognition and the intimacy of the record is rare, and it’s usually a sign an artist is about to either burn out or become something genuinely important. Everything about Jacob Alon so far points firmly toward the latter.
If you can still get a ticket to one of the smaller rooms on this tour, take it. In a year or two, you won’t have the option.
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