One of the Nova Twins’ most vocal celebrity supporters, guitarist Tom Morello, has a story he regularly tells about the peculiar phenomenon of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave fans who simply refuse to believe that he’s Black, even after he repeatedly tells them that his father is Kenyan. “I think it disrupts the false narrative that music like mine can only be made by people who look like them,” he said to the Guardian last year.
It’s a subject addressed, more forcefully, in the opening two tracks of the Nova Twins’ second album. “Look me in the face – say you’ve never met someone like me,” growls Antagonist. “You can buy your looks, but you can’t change your genes – I’m a straight talker, fucking say what you mean,” snaps Cleopatra, which announces the duo as “blacker than the leather that’s holding our boots together”.
