Tuff Times Never Last

The seçond album from London 8-piece 21st century Afrobeat jazz powerhouse Kokoroko, on Giles Peterson’s Brownswood label, serves up an expertly played set of joyous, sweet-soul and R’n’B flavoured Afrobeat and highlife hybrid jazz tracks. From the very outset, with the warm, welcoming opener Never Lost there’s a sense that you’re in safe hands and can comfortably surrender to languid, expansive ensemble brass playing, snaking, rubber-funk basslines, West African guitar licks, rich vocal harmonies, warm keys, and supa-fresh highlife beats. The mood is relaxed, intimate and close, the band laying out tight, expertly put-together soul-flavoured highlife groove-beds for their trademark swinging horn riffs and the gorgeously yearning vocals of bandleader/trumpet player Shelia Maurice-Grey, and when they funk, they funk with a cool, light touch. It’s an inventive, lush, melodically comforting album that flows along easily, blending its various influences into a precisely balanced musical concoction, that even in its more introspective moments remains endlessly musically bright and optimistic.

It’s possible that the London jazz / Afrobeat collective Kokoroko had the vast success of their mellow and dreamy first released tune “Abusey Junction” in the rear view mirror when they made this album. Having expanded into much more maximalist and energetic vibes on their 2022 debut album Could We Be More, here they’ve very much returned to the relaxed “Abusey” feel. Amazingly, though, it doesn’t feel like a step back — not one bit. In fact, it feels like a huge leap in their songwriting strength, their confidence, and their sense of identity as a band. There is a consistent sense throughout of communal cohesion, contemplation, allowing melancholy to flow through yourself and pass. And above all there is constant celebration of love — romantic, sexual, familial, for your friends, for a place — as it is felt in the moment. Bringing in a very British sense of sensuous groove stretching back through Soul II Soul, lovers’ rock, Sade and Cymande, but still keeping its Black Atlantic diasporic breadth, it condensed something very special: the perfect soundtrack to the long hot summer of 2025. It’s easily one of the year’s best albums, and — in a time of chaos and crisis — a beacon calm, stability, fundamental values and hope.