Saul Williams: ‘Resistance fighters need something to listen to’

For Saul Williams, music isn’t just something you pop on while you’re cooking your tea. It’s about ritual and rising up. “I’m talking about invocation, enchantment, possession, you know?” he says from a cafe in London, where he is currently based, gold septum ring glinting between rose-tinted shades.

Alongside training as an actor, the politically charged, genre-agnostic artist helped to popularise the slam poetry scene of the 90s in New York, where he was born and raised, and introduced it to a global audience with his Cannes Caméra d’Or-winning film Slam. After that, he pivoted to music and made punky, industrial-edged albums with rock heavyweights such as Rick Rubin and Trent Reznor, and more recently a Grammy-nominated, improvised “sound ceremony” album, TreePeople, with LA producer Carlos Niño and friends. Adding more mediums to his endless CV, he’s also created a graphic novel and co-directed the cyberpunk musical film Neptune Frost with his wife, the Rwandan film-maker Anisia Uzeyman.

All this and squeezing in the role of Pastor Jedidiah Moore in Sinners, Ryan Coogler’s gothic horror and Jim Crow period piece, which was nominated for a record 16 awards at the Oscars in March, winning four. It kickstarted a busy year for Williams: he’s just finished a string of festival dates performing with militant techno pioneers Underground Resistance and has been teeing up a new album Leap Life, his first solo release in 10 years, as well as a book. Ancestry, uncertainty, the genocide in Palestine – Leap Life makes for a hard-hitting and sublimely crafted listen, with a raft of starry guests including Kamasi Washington and Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja. It’s music for the resistance, as he explains …

Hi Saul – as a jack of many artistic trades, what has working within all these different artforms taught you about the nature of being an artist in 2026?

The main thing that I’ve learned is how important it is to be paying attention – not looking at art as some sort of distraction or a way of letting off steam, but more as a means of engagement and connecting the dots. There’s also a lot of mysticism and ritual in music, before we get to the nightclubs and all of that. All of those things are important to me. Art has a big role to play in this moment, in rewiring people’s imaginations, in being reminded of the power that art can carry in helping to transform not just society but also our readiness to resist and to rebel. Resistance fighters need something to listen to. 

Spoken word and poetry has always held truth to power: what can that artform illuminate that others don’t?

When I started touring with Carlos Niño for our TreePeople album, I felt this very charged environment because of what’s happening in the world. People needed a place to grieve, to feel healed. That show was a bunch of musicians that we love getting together and speaking directly to the moment. I started thinking of what John Keats had said about poets being the midwives of reality. I was like, ah, maybe we’re not midwives, maybe we’re more like death doulas for a dying empire. 

You’ve teamed up again with Niño on Leap Life and the result is fairly bangin’! Why did big electronic beats feel like the best vehicle for your words?

I’ve been really inspired by electronic music for a long time. First, of course, as a hip-hop head and lucky enough to be born and raised in New York at a time where I could witness the birth of a genre. And I remember the first time that I heard all of the amazing shit that was starting to come out of Bristol, all of the trip-hop and drum’n’bass in the early to mid-90s. It was obviously connected to what we had been doing in New York, but it was coming back to us in a form that was like: holy shit! 

I was explaining to someone the other day that not until Soul II Soul in the late 80s did we conceive of the possibility of singing R&B over breakbeats. You don’t have Mary J Blige, you don’t have contemporary R&B, without Soul II Soul and without that influence. That dialogue between the diaspora has always been meaningful. 

On the first track on the album, you mention “simple pleasures”. How do you relax?

Well, I say “plant medicine and simple pleasures”, so that’s one way. Of course, music, walking, hanging with the family, reading. Right now, I’m reading a book of letters that Langston Hughes and Arna Bontemps, two poets, wrote to each other between 1926 and 1967. 

Tell us about something that’s given you hope recently.

I have to preface this by saying that I don’t really fuck with hope. Audre Lorde has a poem where she says: “Hope is counter-revolutionary, pressure cooks”. But I will say that I went through a crazy thing not too long ago where I lost a manager and all this type of shit, and I’m so excited to be working with a team [now] that feels supportive and enthusiastic about releasing material into an environment that is crazy and highly charged. 

What do you make of the idea of joy being an act of resistance?

I’m not into that. I’m not a fan of joy, nor rest. The people that I’ve heard express that are often the same people who have been very hesitant to speak out, very hesitant to make connections between one struggle and another, and I often see it also weaponised by those who want us to make that disconnect. In the US, I’ve seen the Democratic party use that while trying to encourage us to ignore the genocide that they were funding and facilitating before Trump came into office. They want us to forget that this thing happened under the Biden-Harris administration, and that’s how we ended up with Trump – because they refused to address it.

Speaking of artists who are unafraid to speak out, you’ve got Robert Del Naja on your new album. How did you end up working together? Do you have a secret network of artists who are fighting the good fight?

I have been working with Robert behind the scenes for about a decade. Me, Robert and Gonjasufi have an album together that has never been released. The three songs [we did] on Leap Life came together out of the blue – he sent me these sounds and I started chopping them up. We definitely communicate about what’s happening [in the world] and encourage each other behind the scenes. Sometimes we vet people, because there might be families that we’re trying to help out, and he’s like: “Yo, have you spoken to this person? Do you have any information? Can I trust them?” So yeah, [a network] kind of exists.

Are you an artist or activist first?

I don’t think of myself as an activist. The role that I play in “activism”, it’s aligned with what I believe my role is as an artist, which is no different from how Langston Hughes characterised his work, how Nina Simone characterised her work, how Bob Marley characterised his work. There’s a long list. Like I said, resistance fighters need to dance. We need to be energised. I look at art as a kind of alternative energy that fuels and sparks the necessary energy that we need to mobilise. There [have been] tons of moments where horrendous things [have] happened and I didn’t have all the words, I wasn’t leading the charge. This moment with Palestine – I felt it’s my turn.

You’ve also written a forthcoming book, Songs My Mother Taught Me: Why the Artist Must Take Sides, which is effectively about the role of politics in art. What planted the seed?

The slow realisation that there was a lack of political education on the side of a lot of artists who didn’t necessarily realise the power of their vehicle. I was asked by a poetry editor at Haymarket Books: what radicalised you? And this book is the answer to that. It’s about the decision that I made in the third grade that I wanted to be an actor, and when I said I want to be an actor to my parents, my dad said: “I’ll support you as an actor if you get a law degree”. My mother said: “Ah, you should do your next school report on Paul Robeson.” He was an actor and a lawyer, and I did that report on Paul Robeson, and Paul Robeson transformed my relationship to and my understanding of the power of art.

What do you wish you’d known at 18 that you know now?

I have no idea. Only because I look at the process of learning and the idea of everything in its time. There’s been books that have sat on my shelf that I didn’t read until I was ready to actually even notice that they were on my shelf. Maybe I could have orchestrated meeting Anisia sooner. But I also trust the evolution of how things manifested. 

Is there a connection between Sinners and Leap Life? Did you take anything from that role into this album?

Just the alignment – from that moment of beginning to speak up and feeling like I don’t give a fuck. A lot of my posts about Palestine were done on the set of Sinners. I’d be on the set, looking up what’s happening in the world and posting from there. What I appreciate about [Sinners director] Ryan [Coogler] is that he operates with a trust in something larger than himself. Where we shot that film was my first time ever, consciously, on a [former] plantation – and the energy in that ground was crazy. It was my first time visiting actual homes where enslaved Africans had lived that have been preserved. It was a very heavy energy. 

You wrote about that on Instagram and said you hadn’t talked much about your participation in the film up until that point, and I wondered why?

Because I felt like there were more pressing things happening in the world, and I was using my platform at that time in a very particular way and I didn’t necessarily feel like the film needed [me] in those regards to promote [it]. Also, I thought it was probably more exciting for people to be shocked by seeing me in the film. I had so many friends and family reach out. Like: “I’m just leaving the theatre, how the fuck did you not tell me you were in this movie?”

What would you say to somebody struggling to feel optimistic right now?

James Baldwin talks about this – I felt like I was alone in the world and then I opened a book and then I realised that people had been questioning the things that I had been questioning since time immemorial. And so for me, what has been extremely helpful has been literature.

I used to go to the back of Bleecker Street Books in New York and just jump up and down and see what book fell off the shelf. Whatever book fell, I’d be like: “OK, that’s where I’m supposed to start.” That’s how I ended up reading Carlos Fuentes’s Terra Nostra and reading that book is how I ended up writing the poem Children of the Night, and writing that poem is how I ended up … There’s a whole web of things that come from just diving in and realising that we’re not alone in that struggle. That’s the magic.

Leap Life is out via Big Dada Records on 28 August. The book Songs My Mother Taught Me: Why the Artist Must Take Sides is out on 8 September from Haymarket Books (or pre-order here from the Nerve Bookshop). Saul Williams will be hosting a number of listening events from 21 August