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.
