Chaos and the Calm
Chaos and the Calm is the debut studio album by English singer-songwriter James Bay. It was first released on 23 March 2015 via Republic Records.
The album was nominated for a Grammy Award for Best Rock Album, while the song "Hold Back the River" was nominated for Best Rock Song and Bay for Best New Artist.
Critical reception
Chaos and the Calm received mixed reviews from music critics. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalised rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream critics, the album received an average score of 58, which indicates "mixed or average reviews", based on 9 reviews.Commercial performance
Chaos and the Calm debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart on 29 March 2015, having sold over 64,000 copies in the first week of release.Personnel
Musicians- James Bay – lead vocals, background vocals, guitars, piano, bass, drums, keyboards
- Eli Beaird – bass
- Ian Fitchuk – keyboards, drums, percussion
- Eric Darken – percussion
- Jonathan Yudkin – cello and viola
- Gerry Morgan – drums and percussion
- Jon Green – keyboards and vocals
- Lowell Reynolds – engineer
- Sean Badum – assistant engineer
- James Oleksyk – assistant engineer
- Michael H. Brauer – mixing
- Mark Bengtson – mixing assistant and ProTools engineer
- Bob Ludwig – mastering
- Mark Bishop – engineer and mixing
- Jon Green – engineer and mixing