Jasper Llewellyn

Jasper is a founding member and co-bandleader of the band caroline. Signed to Rough Trade Records, caroline released their self-titled debut album to critical acclaim in  2022. The album was included on various ‘Best of 2022’ lists (Pitchfork, NME, The Quietus) and the band was  interviewed by and featured in The Guardian and The i newspaper amongst others. caroline released their second album, caroline 2, in May 2025 to critical acclaim, receiving ‘Best New Music’ in Pitchfork; ‘Album of the Week’ in NME, Stereogum, Quietus, Deezer and Resident; and Rough Trade Shops’ lauded ‘Album of the Month’. The record featured a collaboration with Caroline Polachek, ‘Tell me I never knew that’. Over the past 3 years, the band has toured the USA, Japan, Europe and the UK in support of their first two records, selling out a large number of shows. Notable performances include a five-hour improvised set at the Southbank Centre, sold out shows in Tokyo and New York and the recording of a Tiny Desk Concert.

Preparing for the release of his debut album as a solo artist, Jasper says of his debut single:

“I wrote some parts of ‘For the Teacher’ years ago and others in the days just before recording. Like all of the songs I have written, what this song is ‘about’ somehow arose, like a vague spectre, out of various collisions of sounds and atmospheres and texts and everything else, sometime over the writing, recording, mixing process. The song is a big patchwork of different ideas and eras of me writing songs spanning 5+ years but there is a common thread that has come to run through all of the parts: ideals; how we grasp for them; how they remain beyond us. Spiritual ideals. Ideals of friendship. Of romance. Of ethics, of being a force for good in the world. Something about the koan of reaching for something more than you ARE now when all you have IS now and reckoning with the fact that it is in this ‘reaching for’ that what you are grasping for seems to move further away.

‘For the Teacher’ is in many ways for my Buddhist teacher, Maitreyabandhu - an offering of sorts. His poetry forms the text of the first 2 minutes or so of the song [not in the radio edit version]. His text is from a beautiful, soon-to-be-released book-length poem: a eulogy to his teacher, Bhante Sangharakshita. How to adequately express your feelings about this person who had such a seismic and unique effect on your life? This song acknowledges that lineage of teacher-disciple, teacher-disciple. This song is for both of these Teachers.