“Small Changes” is the eagerly anticipated follow-up to Michael’s eponymous third LP, the Mercury Prize winning, and Grammy Award nominated “KIWANUKA”.

“Small Changes” was produced alongside Danger Mouse and Inflo, the team behind the globally acclaimed “KIWANUKA” and its equally acclaimed predecessor, “Love & Hate”. The new record was recorded between London and Los Angeles. The core trio made up of Kiwanuka and his trusty co-producers expanded into a wish-list ensemble that featured legendary bassist Pino Palladino (D’Angelo, John Mayer, Beyoncé) and Jimmy Jam of the iconic Jam and Lewis songwriting and production duo (Janet Jackson, Prince, SOS Band).

A welcome return for one of Britain’s most talented of songwriters, most recognisable of vocalists, and most virtuosic of guitarists.

STAFF COMMENTS

Paul says: He’s back! After a five year hiatus, Michael Kiwanuka has returned with his fourth studio album, ‘Small Changes’ - another collaboration with super producers Inflo and Danger Mouse that brings that familiar and wonderful sound we’ve come to love from the now 37-year-old North Londoner.

Lead single and album opener ‘Floating Parade’ has a feel of Air circa-Moon Safari, with a consistent, rolling bass perfectly played by legendary musician Pino Palladino. ‘Lowdown (part i)’ sees Kiwanuka reflecting on being down and out but offering a musical sense of optimism, and sister track ‘Lowdown (part ii)’ is a pure instrumental full of rousing string arrangements and guitar sounds that take influence from Pink Floyd.

The intro to penultimate album track ‘The Rest Of Me’ takes us straight back to his debut album ‘Home Again’, but then the drum machine kicks in and kicks off a minute-long musical lead in before the words arrive, and it’s reassuring confirmation that he has no intention of resting on his laurels.

With great soul, this latest collection of songs achieves a direct hit on the heart by keeping it simple, melodically and lyrically - evocatively leading us through Kiwanuka’s musical heart grounds of R&B grooves, psychedelic flourishes, folk storytelling, and pop savvy. There are stories that dig into the personal and hit out at the political all at once, that explore the big and the small stuff, but always with a cadence that hits that sweet spot between sorrowful and sanguine.

We needed this album.

TRACK LISTING

Floating Parade
Small Changes
One And Only
Rebel Soul
Lowdown (part I)
Lowdown (part Ii)
Follow Your Dreams
Live For Your Love
Stay By My Side
The Rest Of Me
Four Long Years

The self-titled record usually marks a definable phase of a musician’s career; an embrace of personal mythology, perhaps, or merely a shift to ‘take me as I am’ straightforwardness. But “Kiwanuka”, the single eponymous word that heralds Michael Kiwanuka’s third album, holds a resonant, complex significance. It signals, for one thing, a swift, pointed rejection of the stage personas that artists have historically donned as both a freeing creative mask and a protective shield. It is an act of cultural affirmation and self-acceptance: a young British-African, contemplating the continued struggle for racial equality, and proudly celebrating the Ugandan name his old teachers in Muswell Hill would struggle to pronounce. It is a nod to a suite of arresting, ambitious soul songs that – while they deftly recall the funkified epics of artists as varied as Gil Scot-Heron, Fela Kuti, Bobby Womack and Kendrick Lamar – cement the singular, supremely confident sound that made 2016’s Love & Hate such an undeniable step up.

Now, following ‘Money’ – the lauded summer single collaboration with Tom Misch – and a sunset Park Stage set that was the talk of Glastonbury 2019, the long-awaited follow-up to that record can be announced. And “Kiwanuka”, like its creator, contains multitudes; it offers both the triumphal, grin-widening empowerment of opener ‘You Ain’t the Problem’ and the ruminative, candlelit intimacy of ‘Solid Ground’. It looks inward and out, across widescreen sonic landscapes constructed in recording studios in London, Los Angeles and New York, and provides a sumptuous showcase for the honey-poured mahogany of Kiwanuka’s voice. It skilfully crosses the streams of the personal and the political. No other name would really have done.

“I remember when I first signed a record deal, people would ask me, ‘So what are you going to be called?’” laughs the man himself, considering the thought process that inspired the title. “And I never thought of that; calling myself Johnny Thunders or whatever, like singers from the past. But I have thought previously, would I sell more records if my name had an easier ring to it? So [on this album] it’s kind of a defiant thing; finally I’m engaging with who I am and I’m not going to have an alter ego, or become Sasha Fierce or Ziggy Stardust, even though everyone's telling me I need to be this, that or the other. I can just be Michael Kiwanuka.”

In many ways this self-possession is a direct consequence of Love & Hate. That record added an unexpected Mayfieldian groove and scope to to the scuffed, ‘70s-infused mellowness of Home Again, Kiwanuka’s Mercury-nominated 2012 debut. Album number two, of course, got its own place on the Mercury shortlist (not to mention a No 1 chart position, a Brit Award-nomination and the wide cultural blast radius afforded by songs that featured on shows like The Get Down, When They See Us and, most notably, HBO’s Emmy-winning Big Little Lies).

“Kiwanuka” marks a reunion of the team that conjured ’s acclaimed, pulsing soulscape – namely Gnarls Barkley hit whisperer Brian ‘Danger Mouse’ Burton and British hip hop producer Inflo – and it actually began life not long after the 32-year-old had finished touring its predecessor. Early Los Angeles sessions – in May, 2017 – proved wildly productive. Maybe, in fact, too productive. The trio had sketched out around eight songs – including lyricless, early versions of ‘You Ain’t the Problem’ and the spine-tingling, wintry ballad ‘Piano Joint (This Kind of Love)’ – at such a breathless gallop that Kiwanuka felt some of his old doubts and insecurities creep back. “It was all so fast,” he reasons. “I remember having a conversation with Danger Mouse where I even asked, ‘Is this my album?’” He chuckles at the memory. “That was the lack of self-belief and me beating myself up.”

An extended recess was called and, when the team fully reconvened in New York in November 2018, Kiwanuka returned to the project with a new vigour, confidence and a clear sense of this new record’s themes and immersive, sonic textures. It was here that he actualised the lyrically knotty, comforting message of ‘You Ain’t the Problem’ (“It almost made me feel like being a rapper,” he grins); where he turned ‘Hero’ into a shape-shifting, thunderously percussive mini-movie, partly inspired by slain civil rights activist Fred Hampton; here that he crafted the hazy refrain – “” – that allied with Danger Mouse’s rhythm guitar playing to give psych-gospel highlight ‘I’ve Been Dazed’ its eerie, hypnotic power.

“We had three weeks and every day I would just do this half hour walk from my hotel by the Brooklyn Bridge to the studio in Red Hook, listening to backing tracks and scribbling lyrics on hotel paper or in my little scrapbook,” he says, more than a little wistfully. “It felt like being 15. And that excitement and childish imagination really helped me forget that it was a scary process.” This youthful sense of play also led to the invocation of some, possibly surprising, tonal influences from Kiwanuka’s childhood as a skater kid who loved Nirvana and Green Day as much as Outkast and Lauryn Hill. Using the cinematic skits and interludes of a record like by The Fugees as a springboard, Kiwanuka wondered if the horn-drenched grandeur of previous lengthy songs like ‘Love & Hate’ and ‘Father’s Child’ could be intensified and transformed into something even more atmospheric, more immersive.

The result is the unhurried, auterish poise that may be one of “Kiwanuka”’s most striking features. ‘Piano Joint (This Kind of Love) Intro’ sets the scene with windblown harmonies and a rumbling, canyon-deep baritone to rival Isaac Hayes (it’s actually Kiwanuka, detuned). ‘Another Human Being’ features a jolting gun shot and a quote taken from a participant in the Civil Rights ‘sit-in’ protests that swept through North Carolina in 1960 (‘Interlude (Living All the People)’ also features the voice of congressman and activist John Lewis). ‘Hard To Say Goodbye’ is a dawnlit, 7 minute opus that Kiwanuka garnished with the sampled sound of twittering birds. “I was really influenced by the vividness of something like ,” he explains, about the desire to create such a rich, inhabitable world.  And he even allowed himself to be coaxed towards stretches of musical terrain that he would never have ordinarily explored. When Danger Mouse first started working towards the skipping, almost ‘80s rhythm of ‘Final Days’ – about as far from “Home Again”’s retro soul as this new record gets – Kiwanuka was hesitant. “It’s kind of spacey so I took a lot of convincing,” he admits. “But we went the whole hog with it and it’s one of my favourite songs now.”

It tells its own story that Kiwanuka – who came up in the pub rooms of London’s acoustic scene before winning the BBC’s Sound Of 2012 poll – is now so happily embracing musical touchstones and styles that may have once seemed contradictory. The revelatory, confessional core of ‘Black Man in a White World’ (which grappled with identity and Kiwanuka’s status in communities where he was conspicuously the only ethnic minority) has evolved into something a little more certain. Now, Kiwanuka’s reengagement with his Ugandan heritage (he hopes, he notes, to play some shows there soon) manifests in skittering Afrobeat drums and guitar lines that he hopes possess “the feeling of a Fela track”.

TRACK LISTING

You Ain’t The Problem
Rolling
I’ve Been Dazed
Piano Joint (This Kind Of Love) Intro
Piano Joint (This Kind Of Love)
Another Human Being (Interlude)
Living In Denial
Hero
Hard To Say Goodbye
Final Days
Interlude (Loving The People)
Solid Ground
Light

Soulful and raw, Londoner Michael Kiwanuka’s critically-acclaimed debut album ‘Home Again’ (April 2012) staked his claim on the list of great British singer-songwriters. Having taken a deep breath and relaxed into his musical approach, Kiwanuka is back, and has delivered his eagerly anticipated second album - and it packs a powerful punch. 'Love & Hate', produced by Danger Mouse, Inflo and Paul Butler, is an outward-looking, drenched with emotional density and rich, soulful production at the helm. Two years in the making, the British Ugandan Londoner has worked with new talent and created a canvas which sees his vulnerability take centre stage. Honest, unabashed, and ambitious, this is Kiwanuka proving that he is ready to secure his position as one of our most exciting homegrown talents. It’s a new world since his debut, and it seems that it’s his for the taking.

TRACK LISTING

1. Cold Little Heart
2. Black Man In A White World
3. Falling
4. Place I Belong
5. Love & Hate
6. One More Night
7. I'll Never Love
8. Rule The World
9. Father's Child
10. The Final Frame

Another of the many standout tracks fom Michael Kiwanuka's Mercury nominated "Home Again" album. "Bones" is a gentle, soul / soft-pop number with a swaying rhythm, lazy drums and put-a-smile-on-your-face melody, drunk-at-the-end-of-the-night shuffle. the exclusive B-side 'Alternate Mix' pays homage to John Jennon's "Instant Karma" with its stripped back production and simple drum machine rhythm (well, that's what we think it sounds like anyway!).