When Michael Kiwanuka sat down to record his fifth album in a modest Southampton studio that he describes as looking like a medieval hut, he had no way of knowing what lay ahead. The songs that became Fudge were written in the same creative breath as 2024's Small Changes, his critically adored fourth album, but they carry a different energy entirely. Where Small Changes was poised and meditative, Fudge is rougher, more instinctive, alive with the sound of a musician discovering what he can do when left to his own devices.
A Clean Break
For the first time since his 2012 debut Home Again, Kiwanuka worked without his longtime production duo, Danger Mouse and Inflo. The pair's sumptuous psychedelic density defined Kiwanuka's sound across three celebrated albums, but Fudge finds him stepping out alone. Opening track Summer Clothes reads almost as a farewell letter to the partnership, its lyrics carrying the line "I'm OK, I found another way" with a warmth that softens the blow.
He self-produced the record with trusted collaborators instead, including multi-instrumentalist Joe Connell from his live band, producer Dom Monks, and longstanding strings arranger Rosie Danvers. The result is something more intimate and more playful than anything in his back catalogue. There is audible tape hiss. There are songs that begin mid-chord, as if someone lunged for the record button just a moment too late. The album opens with a snippet of jazz pianist Chick Corea urging artists to trust their own taste, and Kiwanuka takes that advice at face value.
The Shadow of What Came After
Fudge was meant to arrive in 2025. Then, in July of that year, Kiwanuka suffered a haemorrhagic stroke caused by undiagnosed high blood pressure. He was 38. Emergency surgery, months in intensive care, and a rehabilitation process that continues to this day at a medical centre in Hampshire followed. The album was shelved indefinitely until Kiwanuka made the decision to release it, telling the Guardian simply: "I don't know how long it will be until I can release another record."
That context is impossible to ignore, and yet Fudge refuses to be defined by it. The record was made by a man on the precipice of unforeseen tragedy, but it sounds like a man revelling in creative freedom. Tracks like Love In My Heart stretch past the seven-minute mark, reaching for the handmade psychedelic soul of Shuggie Otis. Stars rips through the album's candyfloss palette with angular, fuzz-smeared guitar. California catches Kiwanuka's voice breaking on the word "wonderful," a moment of fragility that hits differently now.
A Voice That Wavers and Endures
Kiwanuka has always found beauty in vocal imperfection, and Fudge pushes that tendency further. On the penultimate track Sing, the chorus rises with the line "We're nowhere if we never sing," given the added weight of a man whose speech and vocal cords were damaged by stroke-induced brain damage. Across the record, his voice wavers, catches, and finds its footing again, a quality that has always set him apart from more polished soul singers.
The string arrangements are among the finest of his career, particularly on Love In My Heart, where Rosie Danvers' orchestrations weave around vintage drum machine patterns and Why Can't We Live Together-style organ stabs. Steve's Paradise emerges from retro-futurist electronic murk into something warm and layered. The songs occasionally test patience with their unhurried tempos, but patience is exactly what Kiwanuka is asking for.
An Unexpected Gift
Fudge is not the focused revelation of Kiwanuka's finest work. At just over an hour, it sometimes confuses the luxury of time with the impulse to use all of it. But it is often beautiful, and sometimes thrillingly strange. It is unmistakably a Michael Kiwanuka project, achieved even in the face of changes behind the boards and circumstances nobody could have anticipated.
The album arrives as both an unexpected gift and a reminder of what makes Kiwanuka such a vital artist. He has earned the right to wander, and Fudge suggests that even in uncertainty, there is something worth holding onto. Given the uncertainty around his future musical possibilities, this is a record to drink in, let warm your soul, and remember just how lucky we are to have an artist like him.