Jacob Alon: ‘Finding my people is all I’ve ever been searching for’
Through debut album ‘In Limerence’ and spine-tingling live shows, the Scottish folk musician and our Play Next Award winner has been one of 2025’s breakout stars. Here, they discuss their whirlwind year
Jacob Alon describes ‘find ur ppl’, their new collaborative song with jasmine.4.t, as like “taking a selfie with a friend at the top of a mountain”. Both Alon and their fellow Rolling Stone UK Awards 2025 nominee have released superb debut albums this year, fostered vital queer communities online and in person, and emerged as two of the scene’s most essential new voices. The view from the top of the mountain looks pretty sweet.
“I just feel so certain that this is where I’m meant to be,” Scottish singer Alon told Rolling Stone UK at the end of 2024 in an interview for our Play Next series. One year later, via the release of gorgeous debut album In Limerence, a nomination for the Mercury Prize and with audiences stunned to silence across the world, winning our Play Next Award is exactly where they are meant to be yet again.
In Alon’s music is a clear love for the open-hearted and sweetly sung folk songs of Nick Drake and Big Thief’s Adrianne Lenker as well as the flamboyance of shape-shifting pop stars. It’s why they’ve felt equally at home on stage with Olly Alexander and Kae Tempest this year, and are setting themselves up for a limitless future.
“Finding my people and finding that place of belonging is all I’ve ever been searching for,” Alon reflects now, speaking halfway through a UK and European tour in support of Tempest. “To have it here, in this temporal craziness that I’m in now, is so valuable. I’m in Italy right now, and with queer rights here being rolled back, you can feel a necessity and a life force in it all when everyone’s in the room.”
Through their relentless touring schedule across 2025, Alon – previously a nervous live performer – has allowed themselves to embrace mistakes and the unknown at their gigs. It was shown most strikingly at this summer’s Green Man festival, where they were unable to make their guitar, constantly detuning itself due to the blistering sun, behave. Instead, they closed their set with a simply breathtaking a capella rendition of debut single ‘Fairy in a Bottle’, with the distinct sense that the crowd were behind them through all of the bumps and the unplanned detours.
“I’ve been learning to love the moments where things fall apart, because that’s where everyone else comes together,” Alon says. “I was really scared and terrified of things going wrong for a long time, but it’s such a liberating feeling when you’re able to reclaim those as moments of realness. They’re the moments when you feel the most alive, because you have to jump into a state of problem-solving, and that just feels so real.
“On this tour, I really have been trying to take lots of risks and be playful,” they add. “I really love when things feel like they’re on the edge of falling apart, because that’s what a lot of my life feels like to me. It’s about hanging on and pretending like we have a clue what we’re doing, but really we’re just stumbling through the dark and trying our best. I like it when that’s in the performance.”
In Limerence is built upon Alon’s search for community, one they have found through their fellow artists and audience across 2025. “Seeing the way the album sits in other people and hearing their stories at shows has been so powerful,” they say. “It’s blowing my mind. There are things I would have never linked together or considered that people have found deep meaning.
“It’s those unplanned things, things that were part of a subconscious that then come to light. Does it take someone else to connect to them and make them known?” Through this connection has come an understanding that Alon is “not the only one that feels a lot of these things,” and it’s a sense of connection that is lighting the way for their future.
They say: “Feeling part of something bigger than me has made me feel like it’s possible to move through these feelings. It gives me a real sense of hope that, for the first time, I feel this possibility in my heart that the feelings I talk about on the record aren’t all it’s going to ever be.”