Michael Kiwanuka Made Small Changes by Not Trying to Prove Anything
There is a particular problem that arrives after an album wins something. The next record has to answer it, and the usual answer is more: more production, more ideas, more evidence that the win was deserved.
Michael Kiwanuka went the other way, and was unusually explicit about why. “I wonder what an album will sound like when we’re not trying to be cool or anything, you know, we’re not trying to prove anything,” he told The Current. Small Changes is the record that came out of taking that question seriously.
What He Was Reacting Against Was His Own Record
Small Changes arrived on 22 November 2024 through Polydor and Interscope: eleven tracks, forty minutes and eighteen seconds, filed as psychedelic soul.
The album it is answering is Kiwanuka, which won the Mercury Prize, and his diagnosis of it is candid. “The production became, especially on Kiwanuka, like really, really relayed with so many ideas and so many sounds,” he said. He put both that record and 2016’s Love & Hate in the same category: “I definitely was in a different space of trying to prove a lot of things as an artist.”
Artists rarely say this about work that succeeded. Describing a prize-winning album as over-furnished is a real risk, and it only makes sense if the follow-up genuinely commits to the opposite. “I sort of went back to that, which was like, for me the right time,” he said. “Strip everything away and find out what it actually is.”
It is worth being precise about the record he is measuring himself against, because the modesty could read as false. Kiwanuka won the Mercury Prize. Following that with a quieter album is not the safe option dressed up as bravery — it is the option that forfeits the obvious way to capitalise on a win, which is to give the audience a larger version of what it just rewarded.
The Same Producers, a Different Instruction
The interesting decision is that he did not change the team. Danger Mouse and Inflo co-produced Small Changes, as they had Kiwanuka, and as Danger Mouse had Love & Hate before that — a third consecutive collaboration.
Changing your sound by keeping your producers is harder than changing your producers. It means the difference has to come from instruction rather than from personnel, and there is nobody new to blame if it does not land.
Kiwanuka’s account of what he learned is about restraint on his own side as much as theirs. “I’ve learned quite a few things that makes the process even a bit easier,” he said. “Just do what you do, which actually is easier for everyone.” On Danger Mouse specifically: “You can just ask any question, and you know you’re gonna get, like, a really interesting answer, or something you’ve never really considered.”
The writing credits show how deep the partnership runs. Every track is credited to Kiwanuka with Brian Burton and Dean Josiah Cover — Danger Mouse and Inflo’s given names — except the closer, “Four Long Years”, written by Kiwanuka and Burton alone.
What Understated Actually Means Here
His description of the goal is specific: “a lot more understated” than Kiwanuka, and “more about the voice, more about my voice, and more about the lyrics”.
That is a mixing brief as much as a writing one. Putting a voice forward is not a matter of turning it up; it requires everything else to stop competing for the same frequencies and the same attention. The eleven tracks are correspondingly compact — “Live For Your Love” at 2:29, “Lowdown (Part II)” at 2:40 — with only “Four Long Years” and “One and Only” pushing past four and a half minutes.
The two-part “Lowdown” is the tell. Splitting an idea into Part I and Part II rather than developing it across one longer track is a decision to let a thing be what it is and then stop, which is precisely the discipline he says he was after.
The rollout matched the thesis. “Floating Parade” appeared on 10 July 2024, the two-part “Lowdown” on 12 September, and “The Rest of Me” on 3 October — three months of singles that arrive and stop, rather than a campaign building toward a reveal. Nothing about the sequence asks the listener to wait for a bigger moment.
Jimmy Jam Is Playing the Organ, and That Is Not a Cameo
The personnel list contains a detail that is easy to skim past. Jimmy Jam — half of Jam & Lewis, one of the most decorated producers in American pop — appears on this record as a session organist.
Kiwanuka is blunt about the scale of it: “All the Hammond you hear, other than maybe one song, is Jimmy Jam. He’s on essentially a lot of the record.”
Engaging a producer of that stature to play rather than to produce is an unusual inversion, and it fits the record’s logic. A Hammond part is a texture decision, and having one player make all of them is how an album gets a consistent character without layering.
He is not the only heavyweight in a supporting role. Pino Palladino plays bass, James Gadson drums, James Payne slide guitar; Rosie Danvers arranged the strings with Pete Anthony conducting, and six named backing vocalists appear. Kiwanuka himself plays acoustic, electric and bass guitar, drums, piano and Wurlitzer, with Inflo on drums, piano, keyboards, Rhodes and synthesiser.
Kiwanuka also plays a great deal of the record himself, which is the other half of the same idea. When the person who wrote the song is the one playing the Wurlitzer part, the arrangement decisions and the writing decisions stop being separate stages that need reconciling.
The Reception Was Warmer Than the Modesty Suggests
Stripping back is usually the move that costs an artist their reviews. It did not here.
The album took a Metacritic score of 83. The Observer gave it five stars and called it “an exquisite return”; DIY and Uncut both went to four and a half; The Independent, Mojo and NME to four; Clash and The Line of Best Fit to 8 out of 10, the latter calling it “a beautifully crafted return”. Pitchfork was the coolest of the majors at 7.0, and AllMusic sat at three and a half.
Commercially it reached number two in the UK and number one in Scotland, with number two in the Netherlands, five in Flanders, six in Switzerland, eleven in Germany and fifteen in Austria. Those are not the numbers of a retreat.
Why the Experiment Worked
The reason a record made with “nothing to prove” did not simply sound smaller is that the restraint was applied to the arrangement and not to the ambition.
Everything expensive is still present — a legendary rhythm section, real strings, a full choir of backing vocals. What changed is that those elements take turns instead of stacking. That is a harder record to make than a dense one, because every part left in has to justify itself against the silence it is displacing.
It is the same instinct as a stable studio partnership: fewer new variables, more attention to each one. Our piece on why guitar bands went back to tracking live covers a related move, from a different direction.
Small Changes is out now.
