Kele has announced details of his forthcoming studio album, The Waves Pt.1, set for release on May 28 via his own label, KOLA Records in partnership with !K7. Alongside the announcement of the new album, Kele has released a new song lifted from the record, a cover of Bronski Beat’s ‘Smalltown Boy’.
The forced solitude of lockdown gave Kele Okereke the chance to create a record entirely on his own. A record that draws influence from film scores and classical music – music without lyrics that he sought solace in, alongside a fascination with mixing pop songs with longer, more meditative passages. That meditative connection travels throughout The Waves Pt.1 alongside a kinetic connection as he describes his daily nighttime walks around London as “transformative”, allowing him the time and space to listen back to the music he’d created that day. The ritual of these daytime creations into nighttime critiques rolled back and forth like waves, throughout lockdown, informing the album’s title.
