Released: 2023
Young Fathers are probably the go to example of not being too worried about how they see you. From Edinburgh, Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and Graham ‘G’ Hastings have never been afraid to cross the musical streams, not that it’s ever hurt too much as their first album Dead won 2014’s Mercury Prize.
People shouldn’t probably be confused so easily, but as an example of the trio’s involunrary haar they’ve been playlisted by the BBC’s 6Music station but not the urban 1Xtra. Taking time off from all of it, embracing parenthood and in Bankole’s case taking a sabbatical in Ghana and Ethiopia, in the blink of an eye it was five years between 2018’s Cocoa Sugar and it’s follow up Heavy Heavy.
It was an album that felt almost punk in essence – barely half an hour long, rattling cages everywhere – but held a mirror up to a Britain which they felt had changed before their eyes. Never more was this the case than on the Brexit squaring I Saw, a kinetic glam stomper that took the social architects by the collar. “You let the demons out and deal with it, make sense of it after”” Bankole said at the time, caring less and less about the boxes that people seemed intent on putting them in.
The Voice Of Unreason 