This album raises an interesting question: how many other musical artists have had as much of a career as Joshua Idehen prior to releasing their debut album proper? The Nigerian-Brit found his feet in the London poetry scene of the Noughties, just as grime was blowing up and bringing varied local vernacular into the heart of pop culture. A relentless collaborator, he has regularly made theatre, performance and video pieces as well as three albums with his band Benin City, four with Hyperdub-signed electronic duo LV, one with Californian beat scene godfather Daedelus, one in Calabashed with Alabaster DePlume, and among many, many other collaborators been key vocalist for UK jazz ambassador Shabaka Hutchings’s Sons Of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming projects.
Idehen has been no less prolific since moving to Sweden and starting a family, setting up a steady musical parnership with rave-inspired producer Ludvig Parment, which led to the 2023 mixtape Learn to Swim, the breakthrough single “Mum Does the Washing” the following year, and now this actual Joshua Idehen album. And it kind of makes sense that this should come now. Idehen has used many voices and cadences over the years, adapting to collaborators’ funkiness, punkiness or dreaminess, but as he’s increasingly come centre stage he’s found a strong solo performer voice: in equal parts explicitly inebted to finger-jabbing West African preachers, the gnomic pronouncement style of David Byrne and the urchin conversationalism of Mike Skinner, but fully integrated and very much his own.
That’s what we get here. Over piano rave, UK garage, euphoric techno, with samples of ordinary people talking about heavy life lessons, Idehen genuinely becomes a motivational speaker but with exactly enough beatnik, raver, alternative edge and weirdness to feel real, sincere and delightful. It’s the diametric opposite of the ultramarathon running, latest-trend-chasing, hectoring, shaming Diary of a CEO type lecture we’ve become used to: these are participatory stories of raving, loving, losing, getting bruised, knowing that life is limited, but persisting. It’s just a shame that “Mum Does the Washing” became quite so viral, because it and “Choose Yourself” are the weakest links here – harking back to Idehen’s slam poetry days, they are list poems, pileups of whimisical punchlines rather than the heartfelt and believable narratives of the rest of the album. No matter though; you may eventually end up skipping them, but you won’t tire of the rest of this wonderful collision of still-intact innocence and a whooooole lot of experience.
Listen to "This Is the Place":
