Michael Kiwanuka

The session had gone nowhere. Michael Kiwanuka and his multi-instrumentalist Joe Connell had spent the day on songs that were already written, and none of them would come alive. So they stopped, had dinner, and came back to the little room near Kiwanuka’s home in Southampton with no plan except to play. What came out was “Love In My Heart”, a seven-minute song that unfolds slowly and, as the label’s notes put it, opens up like a flower.

“It felt moving to me,” Kiwanuka says in the notes that accompany the album. “I wanted to share it with other people. That was the eureka moment.” That jam became the centre of FUDGE, his fifth album, which Polydor releases on 23 October. It is the first time he has taken on production duties himself since his 2012 debut, Home Again, DIY reported, and it was made without his long-time collaborators Danger Mouse and Inflo.

The Hut Outside Southampton

The room matters to the story. Kiwanuka wanted somewhere he could drop into for an hour at a time and keep working without the weight of a big studio booking, and he found it in a one-room building not far from his house, built from cob, a rough-and-ready organic material. “It looks like a medieval hut,” he says. “I needed a creative ecosystem, so I could pop in and do an hour here and there and keep my creative brain awake.”

He spent his Mercury Prize money on a console and filled the room with equipment. The second thing he needed was a collaborator who could play the parts he could not, and he found one around the corner: Joe Connell, the multi-instrumentalist in his live band. “He can play anything. He’s a one-man machine,” Kiwanuka says. They named the studio Dreamers.

The results sounded bigger than the space. “It sounds like we’re in Capitol Studios on Vine Street, but we’re actually huddled in this shack outside Southampton,” he says of “Love In My Heart”. Many of the songs were recorded in single, flowing takes, and they ran longer than his usual writing, which is part of why the album feels loose and unhurried.

A Record Made Alongside Small Changes

FUDGE was never meant to be a separate project. It grew over three years in parallel with Small Changes, the 2024 album Michael Kiwanuka made with Danger Mouse and Inflo as the follow-up to his Mercury-winning 2019 record, KIWANUKA. With that album carrying the expectations, the heat was off the songs taking shape at Dreamers, which were looser and more stream-of-consciousness.

The two records fed each other. When Kiwanuka felt stuck on one, he could move to the other and come back refreshed, and the more he made, the more his confidence grew. It was a confidence he needed. “I’m always one step away from quitting,” he admits. “My brain’s always saying, ‘You can’t do it, you’re not good enough.'”

The push to keep going came from an unlikely place. Scrolling Instagram during lockdown, he found an interview with the late jazz pianist Chick Corea, part of which now opens the album: “You have to learn to be certain about what you like, not what you think sounds good to someone else… Whatever you think is beautiful, that’s what’s beautiful, and you have to pursue that.”

Working Without the Safety Net

Two songs frame the record and say out loud what it cost to make it this way. “Summer Clothes”, which started life as a contender for Small Changes, opens the album, and “Swings and Roundabouts” closes it. Both deal with his anxiety about working without the safety net of his long-time collaborators.

“It sounds like a break-up song,” Kiwanuka told NME of “Summer Clothes”. “It’s me knowing that the creative relationship I have isn’t going to last forever and I’m going to have find my own road. What do I do then? A lot of this record is working that out.”

The method was the point. “I had to do it differently from the last few records, otherwise there was no reason for this record,” he says. “At some point in each song there had to be outpouring of something that wasn’t overthought. It was almost like someone else was making it.” Even the title carries that spirit. “When I think of fudge it’s playful and childlike, which is good for creativity,” he says. “But also it’s a polite way to say I’m just going to do it.”

The Records Behind FUDGE

Michael Kiwanuka built the album around records that share its sense of play. The notes name the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, Neil Young’s On the Beach, whose winding guitar echoes through “You Sent Me Flying”, Frank Ocean’s Blonde (“It doesn’t make sense but it does”) and Shuggie Otis’s Inspiration Information. “That’s probably my favourite record of all time,” Kiwanuka says of the Otis album. “It sounds like a child’s mind in an adult.”

Some of the songs reach back a long way. “Stars”, with its fuzz guitar solos, was first recorded as he came out of the crisis of confidence that followed Home Again, and its lyric names that loss directly: “When I played I used to feel / Now I don’t feel a thing.” “I remember in school music always seemed to make sense,” he says. “And then suddenly when it became a job it wasn’t making sense. My love for playing guitar disappeared for a while.”

Others are written for people close to him. “Drowning in Your Heart” calls back to his teenage love of Elliott Smith, a song for someone “so sad they’ll sabotage everything”. “Across the Sky” takes the slow-burning reputation of Inspiration Information as its theme, and “Sing” addresses his own doubts about whether to keep making music. “It really does make me feel alive to make music and to sing,” he says.

From Dreamers to the Finished Record

When the songs were ready to leave the hut, Kiwanuka took them to the producer Dom Monks, who has worked with Laura Marling and Big Thief, and to his long-standing string arranger Rosie Danvers, known for her work with Coldplay and Adele, to record what he calls “the posh stuff”. Some string arrangements were recorded at Dreamers itself by Henry Rankin and Harry Fausing Smith’s string quartet. The album was recorded in Southampton and Frome, according to the label.

The look is new too. The artwork, which the label calls a whole new look, comes from Kiwanuka’s old friend Stevie Gee, an award-winning illustrator and animator, whose psychedelic cartoon of bright, smiling faces matches the album’s playful spirit. The full tracklist runs: “Summer Clothes”, “California”, “Just Another Moment”, “Drowning In Your Heart”, “Love In My Heart”, “Across The Sky”, “Stars”, “You Sent Me Flying”, “Move In My Direction”, “Steve’s Paradise”, “Sing” and “Swings And Roundabouts”.

Why FUDGE Is Arriving Now

FUDGE was finished before Michael Kiwanuka fell ill, and its release was held back for almost a year. On 23 September he told fans on Instagram that he had suffered a stroke a few months earlier, after a bleed on his brain brought on by high blood pressure, and that the resulting injury was “quite severe”. He said he still faces significant rehabilitation before he can think about touring again. “It’s a long, tough journey ahead but I’m fighting to get better,” he wrote, according to NME.

The news explains why he cancelled his remaining live shows in the summer of 2025, including festival slots at All Together Now, Sziget, Pukkelpop, We Out Here and Victorious, and a run of North American dates supporting Mumford & Sons. His live commitments remain on hold indefinitely, but the album is coming out with his blessing and his pride in it.

Kiwanuka is not the only artist to find a sound in an unlikely room this season; we wrote recently that Olivia Dean found a house where no music had been made. FUDGE carries its hut with it. Kiwanuka ends his notes by going back to Chick Corea’s advice. “You’ve got to keep following your nose. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense,” he says, smiling, “but it will.”