Michael Kiwanuka – 'Fudge' review: rougher, more playful and deeply moving
The Briton's fifth album is out on Friday via Polydor. NME and The Guardian both award it four out of five stars in advance.
Photo: Alexander Kellner / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0 (cropped and resized)
Single video: YouTube · MichaelKiwanukaVEVO · youtube.com
Single: Sing
Michael Kiwanuka releases his fifth album 'Fudge' on Polydor on 23 October. It is his first record without long-time producers Danger Mouse and Inflo: Kiwanuka first recorded the songs himself in southern England, then completed them with producer Dom Monks and string arranger Rosie Danvers. According to uDiscover Music, many of the songs were written in the same period as its predecessor 'Small Changes' (2024). Health problems, which Kiwanuka himself had told fans about, delayed the release by almost a year.
In NME, Fred Garratt-Stanley calls the album 'deeply poignant, lyrically brilliant'. He finds it more playful and experimental than its predecessor, with grand, epic arrangements, singling out 'Drowning in Your Heart' with its haywire violin and 'Love In My Heart' with its reflective piano outro. Writing in The Guardian, Alexis Petridis says 'Fudge' sounds rougher, with audible tape hiss and a live-in-the-studio feel, but the melodies stick: 'the tunes are uniformly memorable'.
The single 'Sing', the album's penultimate track, arrived on 16 October with a clip that, according to That Eric Alper, was filmed in Morocco. 'It really does make me feel alive to make music and to sing,' Kiwanuka says of the song. 'Fudge' has twelve tracks in total and closes with 'Swings and Roundabouts'.