On FUDGE, Michael Kiwanuka makes peace with taking his time

The circumstances of FUDGE’s arrival are cruelly at odds with its temperament. Delayed by almost twelve months by Kiwanuka's medical troubles, with live commitments suspended indefinitely, the record nevertheless emerged from a period of unusual creative liberty.

Conceived effectively in tandem with 2024’s Small Changes, but largely fashioned in a modest Southampton studio, FUDGE finds Kiwanuka without the twin flames of Inflo and Danger Mouse for the first time since 2012’s Home Again. The pair’s sumptuous psychedelic density has become his calling card and he doesn't seem inclined to change that, here sounding blissed out, untethered, with no particular destination in mind.

FUDGE begins with jazz pianist Chick Corea musing on the importance of trusting one’s own taste, and Kiwanuka takes him at his word. "Summer Clothes" unfurls into female-led harmonies recalling the spectral sweep of 2016's "Cold Little Heart", only with the eddying drums and dramatic thrust stripped away. If his older work had ballast, "Summer Clothes" hangs on cloud-back, pleased with the view.

"California" brings the rhythm section back into focus, but the telephone-filtered vocal, reminiscent of Damon Albarn’s work as 2-D, keeps things slightly at a remove. Strings, backing vocals and Kiwanuka's familiar guitar gradually gather around him until his voice audibly catches on the word "wonderful." There is grandeur here, but Kiwanuka hesitates to be redolent.

"Just Another Moment" curiously tests this commandment to be unhurried, its buttery topline floating over sustained chords while a motorik drum line runs furiously in mid-air, its feet never quite touching the ground. The seven-minute "Love In My Heart" makes a similar virtue of excess, reaching towards the handmade psychedelic soul of Shuggie Otis’s Inspiration Information. At his best, Kiwanuka makes a convincing case for the listener to simply inhabit the work, languid and inviting.

The same indulgence is less flattering elsewhere. "Drowning In Your Heart" initially trudges through an overworked refrain before a wavering, theremin-like output shadows the piano. Harmonic layering arrives like a consoling hand on the shoulder to reassure either the listener or Kiwanuka himself; the earnestness, as always, is fit to spill over.

"Across The Sky" pares back to an initially acoustic reckoning with mortality and artistic posterity, while "Stars", an older composition, rips through the album’s candyfloss palette with angular, fuzz-smeared guitar. Its alternations between sweet vocal passages and a guitar practically choking on its own lament supply a friction otherwise found in short supply.

At just over an hour, though, FUDGE tests the elasticity of its pleasures. "You Sent Me Flying" never quite escapes its languid tempo; "Steve’s Paradis" emerges from retro-futurist electronic murk into lovely layered voices and organ hits, but seems particularly enamoured by its own torpidity.

Even the alluring grain of "Move In My Direction", with its slowly assembling strings and percussion, adds to the prevailing sense of method, of cyclicality. Where Small Changes knew when to leave well enough alone, FUDGE sometimes confuses the luxury of time with the impulse to use all of it. The trouble with having nowhere to be is that the listener can feel under less obligation to stay.

Still, there is something affecting about hearing a musician so apparently beset by harrowing creative questions make peace with the prospect of getting lost. FUDGE is not the focused revelation of Kiwanuka’s finest work, and its melodic ideas can die on the vine before they've lived long enough to resolve. But it is often beautiful, and sometimes thrillingly strange.

It is, unmistakably, a Michael Kiwanuka project, a feat achieved even in the face of the changes occurring behind the boards. He has earned the right to wander.