When the Guardian interviewed them at the start of 2023, Young Fathers expounded on the guiding principle behind their music, a desire to take risks, to throw together wildly disparate ideas they call “mistakeology”. It was apparently born out of an unhappy period at the start of their career, when the then-teenage trio made a game but disastrous bid for mainstream success that achieved nothing other than frustration. That explains a lot, not least the fact that Young Fathers have long existed in a space of their own devising, making music that’s genuinely impossible to label. In the nine years since their debut album won the Mercury prize, people have tried pretty much everything on for size, from “alternative hip-hop” to “neo-soul”, only to discover that none of them fit.
It almost goes without saying that this is a bold strategy in a world increasingly driven by genre-based playlists and if-you-like-that-try-this algorithms – “people tell us ‘it’s too rocky for us’ or ‘it’s too hip-hop for us’, so everyone just pushes us away” protested Kayus Bankole in the same interview – but, gatekeepers notwithstanding, it seems to be working for them. Heavy Heavy might be the clearest expression of mistakeology in Young Fathers’ catalogue; it’s also fantastic. It’s an album packed with ideas that probably shouldn’t work in tandem, but somehow do, which pulls you headlong into a world where a distorted, glam stomp-driven excoriation of Brexit and the head-in-the-sand mentality behind it that winds up as an exuberant, irresistible choral singalong – “Brush your teeth! Wash your face! Run away!” – is far from the most improbable thing on offer.
Elsewhere, pop hooks meld with warp-speed beats and soulful vocals; warm, euphoric melodies break through production that fizzes and seethes; wild experimentation is crammed into the confines of three-minute songs; industrial noise and scrambled hip-hop samples coexists with piano ballads. A hefty dose of the music is inspired by band members Alloysious Massaquoi and Bankole’s African roots – vocals often slip into Yoruban, the West African language in which Ululation is written – and the latter’s lengthy visits to Ethiopia and Ghana in the years after they made Heavy Heavy’s predecessor, 2018’s Cocoa Sugar. All this happens in barely half an hour – in that sense at least, Heavy Heavy is a model of economy; 30 minutes of music marked by the thrilling and increasingly rare sense that you’re in the presence of something that’s unique and completely modern, that couldn’t have been made before now.
On paper it might look like a mess, or at least exhausting information overload. But it invites dancing, even as the lyrics lean towards topics befitting the album’s title – racism, police brutality, gold mining’s effect on the environment in Africa. The songs on Heavy Heavy were at the heart of Young Fathers’ intense, ecstatically received festival sets this summer; they didn’t win the 2023 Mercury for which they were nominated, but their performance of I Saw – the aforementioned Brexit-themed glam stomp – was a showstopping highlight of the award ceremony. It ended with waves of electronic noise and the band’s Graham Hastings alone on the stage, staring down the music industry audience. He looked like a man who knew his band had made something genuinely special, which moreover exists at one remove from anything else happening in 2023. If that’s the case, he was right: powerful, uncategorisable, occasionally inexplicable, Heavy Heavy is the perfect advert for the virtues of going your own way.
