The world has changed a lot in the five years since Young Fathers released Cocoa Sugar, and they don’t like what they see. In a press release for ‘I Saw’, the exhilarating second single from new album Heavy Heavy, the band wrote, ‘it’s a big bully with shite down their leg, still swaggering. 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.’

That’s quite a potent summary of the problems Britain is facing in an age where right-wing policy makers and alt-right keyboard warriors seem to be gaining ground within mainstream culture. Yet despite the obvious political and social commentary underlying Heavy Heavy, this is also an album filled with touching personal experiences and playful experimentation. One third of Young Fathers, Alloysious Massaquoi, frames the album as a way to make sense of the past half-decade’s chaos. ‘Because we’ve not put anything out in the last few years, and because of what was happening in the world and to our lives individually, we had this sort of heavy feeling. There’s a lot that we’re processing throughout the record.’

This lengthy gestation process is partly because, as happens with so many projects when people hit their thirties, life got in the way. Graham Hastings started a family, Kayus Bankole travelled to Africa, while Massaquoi focused on learning to be a better ‘son, brother, uncle, that kind of thing’. A few years off must have been welcome for a band which has spent the better part of two decades cementing their place in the music industry; and it’s also changed their process in the studio. Young Fathers have learned to value and accentuate their hard-won creative rapport as a trio.

‘Heavy Heavy has been a long-ass process,’ admits Massaquoi. ‘It’s taken fucking ages. This is one we’ve recorded and produced ourselves, just us three in the studio. We took time away from each other as well, and we got older, more reflective. The mundane nuts and bolts of life have started to matter more. It’s been long but it’s good to arrive at a finished record.’

As with any Young Fathers record, each song contains a dizzying array of elements that bristle and flow alongside each other, melodies weaving in and out with an intensity that accentuates the creative verve that has made the band critical darlings. Yet many of the songs remain untested live, and in fact the band haven’t been on a stage since 2018. ‘Figuring these songs out live is rekindling the passion and making it seem more real than what it was in the last few years. A song takes on a new lease of life when you’re performing it in front of an audience. There’s a lot of energy in our live performances, so we’ll have to be match-fit in a way that suits the songs. We just fucking go for it.’

Letting go and taking life at full pelt lies at the root of Massaquoi who, despite his and his bandmates’ willingness to put their head above the parapet by attaching themselves to political and social movements, speaks in almost therapeutic terms about comfort and the communality of music. He’s representative of a band which, particularly after an extended period apart, have become comfortable enough in their own skin to champion the value of family and self-discovery alongside the more headline-grabbing grievances towards Britain’s glaring inequalities and iniquities both past and present. These potentially conflicting themes form the backbone of Heavy Heavy’s stand-out track ‘Geronimo’ (Massaquoi’s favourite song from the new album), its meditative refrain of ‘get on, get off’ urging the listener to disengage from the modern world’s travails. 

^{Picture: Fiona Garden}

Despite the album’s focus on viable alternatives to anger at our political system, there’s no sign that this trio have mellowed sonically from their fidgety, fast-paced take on hip hop with Tape One and Tape Two, those electrifying debut EPs from 2013. Their early work, crammed with near-infinite reservoirs of invention and unrelenting momentum, has the do-or-die approach of a group of lads with plenty to lose and even more to prove. Coming from a working-class background and making music without any financial safety net, the near panic-stricken lo-fi bangers in those EPs were produced in less than two weeks, a remarkable accomplishment given their gleaming polish.

Since then, whether picking up a Mercury Music Prize for their 2014 debut album Dead or Scottish Album Of The Year Award for 2018’s Cocoa Sugar, their incredible creative vigour has made them seem untouchable. Yet age has helped Massaquoi appreciate the gamble that himself, Bankole and Hastings took in pursuing a career in music. 

^{Picture: Jordan Hemmingway}

‘You don’t really think about class until you see a politician trying to make rules for everybody else, and they’ve got a bank balance that affords them the luxury of being able to decide stuff that doesn’t affect them. There’s a big difference in being, like, if I didn’t do music I’ll be alright. We wouldn’t be alright because this is our livelihood. I think when you come from that perspective, things just seem a bit more real. Because if you don’t succeed, there’s going to be consequences. The only way to combat that stress, to bring that joy back into your life, is to do something creative. It’s a beautiful thing to be able to express yourself. I think that a lot of the time when you’re working class, you’re not supposed to try anything too fancy. There are only a few outlets for men, whether it be football or the pub, to relate to things. We were fortunate to find music and to express ourselves in that way. There’s a lot of repressed people in the world.’

That palpable sense of freedom makes each album from Young Fathers truly special. This is irrepressible music of a kind which has made the band a unique proposition, impossible to pigeonhole and  difficult to deny. ‘You just want it to be different, and you want your work to say something that hasn’t been said before. We can’t really afford to do this for a laugh. We take this seriously.’

Young Fathers play O2 Academy Glasgow, Friday 3 and Saturday 4 March. The List magazine is available for free across Edinburgh and Glasgow. Subscribe to have our our print edition delivered directly to your door.