Michael Kiwanuka by his friend Stevie Gee
Out today on Polydor
Michael Kiwanuka’s fifth album opens with some solid words of advice from the late jazz visionary Chick Corea, about pursuing your own path and trusting your musical judgment. “Whatever you think is beautiful, that’s what’s beautiful,” says the keysman, in an excerpt of a 1982 interview. Later, at the end of one song, we hear a sliver of the creative process, where Kiwanuka admits to a collaborator: “I don’t know if this is the right thing to do, it’s flipping scary.” But wobbles aside, this is a record that relishes freedom and finds space in unfussiness. Go on, it says, get squidgy, be malleable; be prepared to fudge up the formula a little.
Kiwanuka, a linchpin of new British soul, wrote much of this album alongside his last. 2024’s Small Changes changed tone, swapping his usual big, juicy takes on dusty soul and psychedelia for a more sombre pace and a looser, freestyle approach, produced with frequent collaborators Danger Mouse and Inflo. It went to No 2 and was called his creative peak – but achieved perhaps not entirely on his own terms. His sound has always elegantly evolved with each album, but Kiwanuka felt it time to go back to basics, opting to produce the follow-up himself, with engineer Dom Monks and members of his live band. He created a makeshift studio in Southampton, calling it Dreamers, and bought a mixing console with his Mercury prizewinner’s money for 2020’s Kiwanuka.
This is his sound unravelled, stripping his former records’ big production back to something that resembles dropping by an old analogue recording studio at dusk and peering through the glass
Fudge was originally due last autumn but was delayed due to a devastating turn for the worse in Kiwanuka’s health. In July 2025, he “suffered a stroke brought on by a bleed in my brain, brought about by high blood pressure”, the 39-year-old wrote on social media. The damage affected his vocal cords and speech, as well as his neural pathways, and after emergency surgery came a long stretch of intensive care. He’s currently still in a rehabilitation centre, where he’s been recovering for months. “I don’t know how long it will be until I can release another record,” he told the Guardian.
We must, then, savour Fudge and all its sticky delights. If Small Changes was loose, this is his sound unravelled, stripping his former records’ big production back to something that resembles dropping by an old analogue recording studio at dusk and peering through the glass. Songs end abruptly, the click of the tape can be heard and the sound of being counted in; some came out of jams, “blurring the lines between composition and performance”, he explained. The importance here was on play – from Shuggie Otis’s 1974 album Inspiration Information to the psychedelic cover illustration of Kiwanuka, straight off a Haight-Ashbury street corner, by his friend Stevie Gee.
Stevie Gee’s cover illustration for Fudge
Kiwanuka is both bandleader and producer, but while there are plenty of majestic strings, many of the tracks have an intimate singer-songwriter energy too: Across the Sky, Sing and Move in My Direction are acoustic-based songs that channel a boyhood love of Elliott Smith and also Neil Young. As the track called California suggests, this is an album for the tape deck when you’re winding up the side of Laurel Canyon Boulevard at night and looking out wistfully over the hills. Or at least it could be.
Fudge is, of course, a deeply affecting listen, and impossible to separate from the present. Sing, an efflorescent and wistful number with classic songwriting at its core, calls to the unifying spirit of using your voice and the complex devotion of partnership. One of the album’s centrepieces, Love in My Heart, also hits hard. Written from the perspective of someone who wishes they were a better person for a former flame, the song takes on a new hue as Kiwanuka sings lines like “Promise to remember me / Never compromise / And do my best for me / To take me there.”
The track is Kiwanuka’s masterpiece, a ballad that swells gently into cosmic majesty, with backing vocals and searing Hollywood strings, and then into an electrical storm of guitar and distortion. He’s said that Stars – which he wrote way back around 2012, the time of his debut album – is another song that reinvigorated his love of his instrument, its confident thick fuzz bursting in from the start. And the resonance of the final track, Swings and Roundabouts, will not be lost on anyone. “Baby it’s alright / I’ll hear you sing again / Life has a way / It swings in roundabouts,” Kiwanuka coos over a contemplative beat. Corea was right: it really is beautiful. Beautiful and bittersweet.
Kate Hutchinson is the Nerve's music critic. A writer and broadcaster, she’s behind the audio series The Last Bohemians, and the 2025 music podcast Studio Radicals, which Radio Times called "podcasting at its best". She currently presents a fortnightly show on Soho Radio.