Black to the Future

This is the group’s masterwork to date, a thrillingly rich tapestry that combines passionate reflections on the meaning of black power, sharpened in particular by last summer’s Black Lives Matter protests, with sonic love letters to black culture past and present.

Black To The Future is both musically and thematically bold and important. It is a major statement contextualising the present, aiming to better understand the past and, hopefully, providing a provocation for a better future.

Black to the Future jams is a staggering achievement. Musically and culturally, Sons of Kemet not only holistically conceive of a future, they begin to create one right now.

It doesn’t feel like as much of an instant classic as 'Your Queen Is A Reptile', but it has all the makings of a slower, more thought-provoking, ultimately more accomplished project, the likes of which will remain relevant for decades to come.

This well-conceived, important album unsurprisingly features a wealth of inspired playing both from the band and the guests. It will likely stand as a landmark recording for Shabaka Hutchings, who continues to blaze trails as one of today’s leading music artists.

Like anyone daring to take a glimpse into the future, Hutchings is met with confusion, astonishment and alienation. Fortunately, he assimilates the tools, knowledge and creative bandwidth to acutely document them, and more importantly, navigate them in a useful, inherently joyous way.

The ground covered on Black to the Future is immense. The visceral passages really slash deep, the moments of unbridled energy are exhilarating, and the meditative moments reach crescendos of total beauty.

Jazz tempos have always posed an implicit challenge to the 4/4 order, but this is an album that really wants its transmissions to be received.

Never once do Sons of Kemet compromise on their fiercely individual sound.

The music is raw, melodic and explosive, and captures the inner reflection one must undertake to properly envision the future.

The immense variety on this record does not come at the expense of cohesiveness nor its ability to progress the themes of the ensemble’s previous work.

It's sonically deeper and more emotionally engaging, from start to finish, than any previous SOK release. [Jun 2021, p.83]

Some of the guest vocalists on this LP approach this level of militancy but, in places Black To The future is also poppier and dancefloor friendly than anything Hutchinson has ever released. [Jun 2021, p.30]

While it may not take over the world, it is a perfect record for this moment in time as an expression of collective weariness in the midst of an almost two-year and counting pandemic worldwide, the spectre of Brexit in the UK, and amidst the struggles of the civil rights movement in the U.S. to stop police brutality and mass incarceration.

Black to the Future is highly accessible, politically engaged jazz that’s more focused on communication than individual experimentation.