Young Fathers have announced their first new album since 2018’s Cocoa Sugar, a 10-track LP titled Heavy Heavy. Coming Feb. 3, 2023, on Ninja Tune, the Mercury Prize-winning Scottish trio’s fourth album is preceded today (Oct. 20) by the video for “I Saw,” our second preview of Heavy Heavy after July’s excellent “Geronimo.”
“I Saw” is built on a strutting groove, with a dark, distorted bassline and drums undergirding the band’s depiction of a rotted-out relationship between rulers and the ruled. “Give me that bulletproof vest and don’t forget / I’m not susceptible to your nonsense, I’m a winner,” they command, then softly insisting, as if from the opposing perspective, “I saw what I saw / I keep on walking the line.” The conflict between governors and governed intensifies along with the instrumental, Young Fathers’ voices multiplying until “I Saw” takes on the character of a wild choir, its beat pounding underneath.
“It’s a big bully with shite down their leg, still swaggering,” Young Fathers—Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole and G. Hastings—say of their new song’s subject. “That pamphlet through your door blaming the establishment and immigrants for everything going wrong. The stench of long-dead empire, trudging along, a psychological hammer to your head in every step. The delusion.”
23-year-old Austrian-Nigerian artist and filmmaker David Uzochukwu directed the “I Saw” video, in which Young Fathers and others seem to celebrate both death and life, darkness and light, during a day and night beside a beach, rushing from their fire into the shadows at its end.
Speaking to Heavy Heavy’s title, Bankole says only, “You let the demons out and deal with it. Make sense of it after.”
See the “I Saw” video below, and find Young Fathers’ 2014 Daytrotter session and the details of Heavy Heavy further down.
Heavy Heavy Tracklist:
1. Rice
2. I Saw
3. Drum
4. Tell Somebody
5. Geronimo
6. Shoot Me Down
7. Ululation
8. Sink Or Swim
9. Holy Moly
10. Be Your Lady
Heavy Heavy Art:
