Late Night Final - A Wonderful Hope (LP) - Yellow Vinyl

J. Willgoose, Esq. has always been a builder of worlds with Public Service Broadcasting, threading archival voices through gleaming machinery until history feels close enough to touch. Late Night Final is him stepping into the quiet after the noise. A Wonderful Hope arrived in December 2020, in the thick of lockdown winter, and it plays like the city at 2 a.m. when the buses run empty and traffic lights talk to no one. The alias itself is a neat wink to old newspaper vendors in Britain who once cried late night final on street corners, and the music carries that air of last editions and dimmed shopfronts.

Where PSB can be busy with spoken samples and propulsive arrangements, this record sits back and breathes. It leans into ambient and kosmische currents, all synth glow and patient movement. You hear the influence of Eno and the softer edges of Tangerine Dream rather than the crunchier, riff-driven parts of Willgoose’s main gig. It is instrumental and largely wordless, so the melodies do the talking. He wrote it during the long pause when tours were shelved and plans washed away, and that sense of suspended time is everywhere. The album does not wallow, though. There is warmth tucked into its corners, the kind you find on a long night walk that starts out of restlessness and ends with a calmer head.

The Human Touch was the early calling card. It swells on a slow pulse that feels like a heartbeat someone has tried to remember. Arpeggios float in and out of view, never quite locking into a hook, which is the point. The track circles a feeling rather than chasing a climax, and in 2020 that felt honest. The title track, A Wonderful Hope, brings a gentle lift. Pads bloom, then retreat. A synth line nudges forward like first light over rooftops. It is careful and unhurried, the kind of piece that makes you notice the room you are in. Willgoose has spoken before about a love for hardware synths, and this album has that tactile quality. You can almost picture the small lamps in a home studio, faders creeping up, a pattern looping until it clicks.

Fans who came to this project from Public Service Broadcasting might expect drama and crescendos. What is refreshing here is the refusal to force it. The emotional hit comes from texture. When a bass throb appears, it arrives like a passing car outside the flat. When a high synth line lands, it does not announce itself so much as take a seat beside what is already there. That restraint makes the payoffs matter. Anyone who lived through the hush of those months will recognize the mood. Music that came out of 2020 runs the risk of being tied too tightly to that moment, but A Wonderful Hope sidesteps it by sounding like recovery as much as reflection.

It also feels great in the format most of us discovered it in, late at night with the lights low and the laptop far away. If you have been hunting for Late Night Final vinyl, this is the one to spin from start to finish. The noise floor is suitably quiet and the low end carries just enough weight to keep those soft kicks grounded. A Wonderful Hope vinyl has become a nice recommendation piece in shops too. I have seen more than one Melbourne record store tuck it next to PSB with a handwritten note suggesting it for fans of ambient electronics, and it keeps earning new converts. If you are browsing from home and want to buy Late Night Final records online, it sits neatly alongside Public Service Broadcasting albums on vinyl, a side path that makes the main road make more sense. Even crate-diggers in far flung corners, from Soho basements to sellers who ship vinyl records Australia wide, have started pairing it with Cluster and contemporary synth records in the new arrivals bin.

The charm here is how unshowy it is. Willgoose does not lean on a concept or a grand narrative. He lets repetition do its slow work, trusting that listeners will come to meet him. By the end, the album has folded your evening in on itself, the way a good night drive does when you realize you have gone a little farther than planned. It is a small, luminous statement from a musician known for scale, and that contrast is part of the pleasure. If Public Service Broadcasting is the bright billboard, Late Night Final is the light left on in the shop next door. Both have their place. This one just asks you to step closer and stay a while.