The album’s sound is distinctly different from the SAW productions, as one would expect from a record made by a different person for different purposes. It is more organic, more varied in texture, less reliant on the specific sonic signatures of 1980s pop production. It has the quality of music made by someone who knows what they’re doing and who is not constrained to deliver a particular commercial formula — because the commercial expectations were, by his own account, minimal when he started making it.
The birthday framing of the album — made for the milestone of turning fifty, titled to mark that milestone — gave the project a personal coherence that purely commercial pop records typically lack. It was not made to hit a particular chart format or to compete for a specific radio demographic. It was made because he wanted to make it, for the occasion of a specific personal milestone, and because the recording tools available to him made it possible to make it the way he wanted to rather than the way a production team or a label A&R executive would have directed it.
The market’s response — UK number one, platinum certification — was something he genuinely did not anticipate. He has said this clearly: “I didn’t anticipate anything fantastic happening, and it just went boom.” The album’s success is partly attributable to the cumulative effect of everything that preceded it — the original SAW success, the meme’s cultural ubiquity, the nostalgia for 1980s pop that was commercially active in the 2010s, the specific affection that the British public has developed for artists who maintain consistent integrity over long careers. But it was also attributable to the album being genuinely good — to the music delivering on what the reputation suggested it might be.