With the announcement of his upcoming studio album, ‘Croak Dream’ (due out on 6 February 2026), artist Puma Blue, pseudonym of Jacob Allen, shared his new single ‘Desire.’

Croak Dream’s mesmerizing world of sound was crafted during straight-to-tape sessions at Peter Gabriel’s Real World studios with co-producer Sam Petts-Davies (The Smile, Warpaint), in a wonderfully idiosyncratic manner compared to previous Puma Blue recordings. “‘I didn’t want to record another album like Holy Waters that just captured the sound of a band in a room’” Allen explains—so he and Petts-Davies brought song fragments to the band to improvise over, later fashioning those improv sessions into loops that were worked into the final recordings. The process resulted in a living organism of an album that surprised even those who played on it: “When I sent the band the finished album, it was as if they got to hear themselves playing on these songs for the first time.”

“I’ve put a lot of work into letting go of expectations” Allen continues, while reflecting on how the album captures him in this current moment. “Making this record became like a deep release of breath as I got further away from some of those limitations. My imagination swelled with all this new fire, I fell in love with it all again. It became less a question of what is this? and more like, what else? How far can I push this thing? The result is a daring evolution for Puma Blue, combining bold experimentations with a sharp emotional clarity. It finds Allen at his most instinctive, embracing a memento mori awareness that drives feeling over precision and reveals beauty in distortion and risk.

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