Martha-Jane and the Art of the Old Groove on the Debut EP What Is Home?
Martha-Jane and the Art of the Old Groove on the Debut EP What Is Home?
Six Tracks Recorded Near Paris Wrap Strings and Horns Around One Question About Belonging
On the cover of What Is Home?, her debut EP of retro pop-soul, Martha-Jane stands in rose velvet with her back to the camera. She is pulling open floral curtains. Behind them wait a city skyline, a white house and a breaking wave. The four songs between the intro and the outro visit each of them, then one place she has never been.
Martha-Jane’s New in Town, from What Is Home?, is in the playlist below, with the pop and retro pop tracks this desk keeps on rotation, and the Martha-Jane profile collects the rest of the coverage. The EP came to this desk through PopHits.Co Music Charts, which verifies independent artists and places their releases across its network of music news sites. Give it a spin, then keep reading for how it was built.
Strings, Horns and the Old Groove Martha-Jane Writes About in This Place I’ve Never Been
That last place is the key to the sound of What Is Home?. On This Place I’ve Never Been, Martha-Jane sings that a few notes and an old groove bring the mood back. Then she names its homes: a studio called 54, a canyon full of laurel, Soul Train and the Troubadour. Studio 54 was New York’s most famous disco. Laurel Canyon was where Los Angeles songwriters lived and wrote. Soul Train ran on American television for decades, and the Troubadour still books singers in West Hollywood. All four belong to American music in the 1970s. She grew up a generation later, in suburban Paris. So those places reach her through records and old photographs.
The arrangements answer with a full band. New in Town, released as a single in January 2024, shows how the groove is built. First, Pierre-Olivier Maigrat’s bass and Sacha Fuhrmann’s drums and percussion carry it. Léo Touzin adds rhythm guitar, and Paul Gervreau plays piano and a Fender Rhodes. Above them, Jean-Philippe Audin directs the strings and also plays first violin, violin and viola. Julien Chirol on trombone and Michel Feugère on trumpet make up the horns.
The Places Martha-Jane Visits on What Is Home
New in Town is an arrival story. Its narrator first saw the skyline at ten and decided to own the town. Then the devil city turns gloomy and plays dirty. Still, the song stays upbeat. Its chorus is a run of short commands: lights on, dream on, give in to the city. By contrast, St Pierre, a single from March 2024, slows down for a ballad about a childhood island. Waves crash, salt hangs in the breeze, and a house behind a gate will outlast everyone who played there. Meanwhile, Street Corner King stays in town. Its narrator passes the same long-haired man every day, among his books and plastic bags. Even the genre turns up in his portrait: “Blue eyed soul, king of books.”
On New in Town, Jean-Philippe Boisson Produces and Mixes While Martha-Jane Sings Lead, Harmony and Backing Vocals
Behind the desk on that single sits Jean-Philippe Boisson, credited as producer, sound engineer and mixing engineer. Boisson also shares the arranging credit with Paul Gervreau. So the hands that shaped the parts also set their balance. Afterwards, Adil de Saint Denis mastered the track. Martha-Jane recorded What Is Home? at Studio Omega near Paris, and Liquid Path Records released it on 19 April 2024.
On the same track, the voices are all hers. She wrote the words and the music. The credits also list her for the lead, the harmonies and the backing vocals. As a result, every voice stacked in the mix belongs to one singer. That suits someone who spent years in choir and dance before writing songs.
Her route to the EP was not quick. She organised studio meetings with artists whose names she knew from CD booklets. She also found work in the music business. Then, a year before the pandemic, a health scare made everything feel urgent. She gave herself permission to make her own music. She wrote these songs while studying music theory for two years at jazz and contemporary music schools.
Where Martha-Jane’s Debut EP Meets Carole King, Steely Dan and Minnie Riperton
Martha-Jane names her influences plainly: Stevie Wonder, Carole King, Steely Dan, Minnie Riperton and Michael Jackson. Michael Jackson came first. It was a Sunday morning in September 2001, in suburban Paris. A girl with a bowl of chocolate cereal saw a black fedora and a single sparkling glove on television. The image stayed.
Carole King is the most direct line into this EP, and the covers make the case. Jim McCrary shot the cover of Tapestry, her 1971 album, in the living room of her Laurel Canyon house. King sits barefoot by a window, holding a tapestry she had stitched herself. Martha-Jane’s cover for What Is Home? is also an interior, with curtains in place of the window.
The staging runs through the whole release. Antoine Jaussaud’s photographs keep her in that room, with the same floral wallpaper, a floral sofa and the same velvet. Pauline Cochet’s shoot for the same EP moves her onto a red backdrop. There, a glossy floor doubles her reflection. Audran Sarzier directed the video for the first single at Abbey Road Institute Paris. Martha-Jane wrote its script and designed its set herself, and the band appear as extras.
Steely Dan show why credits matter. The band had seven session guitarists try the solo on Peg before Jay Graydon’s take became the keeper. In other words, records like that reward anyone who reads the sleeve. Martha-Jane did, and the streaming credits for her first single list ten people for four minutes of music. Finally, Minnie Riperton links two of her influences at once. Stevie Wonder produced Riperton’s 1974 album Perfect Angel under the name El Toro Negro.
Who Should Hear What Is Home, and Where to Follow Martha-Jane Next
What Is Home? is for listeners of blue-eyed soul and contemporary soul. It also reaches toward yacht rock, a tag Martha-Jane gives her own first single. Fans of Carole King and Steely Dan who want a newer name with the same habits should start here. For playlist curators, the six tracks run from an 84-second intro to a ballad of four and a half minutes. When the EP came out in April 2024, INFOMUSIC and Musikepool both covered it.
Since then, Martha-Jane has kept the releases coming. Christmas Cheer arrived in November 2024. Maggie’s Ring and Carry On followed in 2025, and she recorded the second at Abbey Road Studios in London.
AltPop.News’s curator team:
“At about twenty minutes, What Is Home? runs like one side of a 1970s LP, intro and outro included. Martha-Jane sequenced a debut EP the way her heroes sequenced albums. That styling choice is what holds it together.”
The whole EP plays in the Spotify player at the top of this page. Follow Martha-Jane on Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and X. Every lyric is on the official website.
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