“It’s bittersweetly ironic that my career is taking off at a point where sometimes I do feel like, shit, we might be at war,” Joshua Idehen told The Guardian last October. “Why am I making music when it all feels a bit Mad Max?”
Scroll forward a few months and the Nigerian poet-come-party-starter’s debut album has arrived right in the midst of the USA and Israel’s blitz of Iran and the subsequent fallout that has sent shockwaves through the Middle East and around the world. In such fractious times, an album like I know you’re hurting, everyone is hurting, everyone is trying, you have got to try could easily feel tin-eared, lightweight and maybe even inappropriate. Here we have a relentlessly positive dancefloor-focused record full of affirmations that are easy to scoff at – and yet, there’s something indelible about what Idehen is doing.
The Stockholm-based artist is no newcomer, despite releasing his debut album at 45 years old. He spent 20 years in London building a name in the city’s poetry scene, featuring on records from its vaunted jazz scene and fronting the trio Benin City. Now, with the help of producer Ludvig Varment, he is stepping out on his own and bringing it all to bear on I know you’re hurting, everyone is hurting, everyone is trying, you have got to try.
The album builds on the viral success of 2024’s “Mum Does The Washing”, but for the most part shirks political messaging in favour of personal storytelling and heartwarming preaching. It comes flying out of the gates with a series of soul-sample-backed house numbers, Varment furnishing the vocalist with an array of uplifting arrangements that match his mood; an overwhelming love with an undercurrent of vulnerability. Indeed, where we find him on opening track “You Wanna Dance Or What” is the perfect encapsulation: on a dancefloor, feeling slightly out of sync with the world, “desperate to be held” and ending up in a tender, understanding moment with a stranger. “Alright my G, we gonna go dance or what?” the stranger asks him – and Idehen and Varmint are then on hand to make sure the beats are flowing.
“It Always Was” basically follows the same formula – house beat, chopped up soul sample, story of fondly-remembered moments, overall message of love and self-acceptance – and yet it’s such a potent combination that the enjoyment doesn’t waver for a second. The following “This Is The Place” switches a soul sample for a chopped-up piece of vox pop cheese (“I think it’s all about the rhythm and the love”) but the rest of the recipe is the same. Again, the mood remains at a peak, as Idehen is so good that he makes you feel like you’re right there with him, in the club, “in this sacred place”.
Idehen and Varment bring the energy down slightly for “Could Be Forever”, tugging the heartstrings with some piano, violin and choral vocals. Idehen is just as compelling in this more pathos-laden setting in which he preaches about respecting your elders and relays an anecdotal snapshot about a toilet attendant he met who has “got no papers to make real paper”.
In fact, the moments where he takes us into these moments from his life are the most vivid – emotionally and visually – on the record. There’s the description of him and his old friend as “two broken men in Leicester Square” on the fizzing breakbeat of “Whatever Comes” and the recounting of a potential relationship that never quite sparked into life on the elegiac rave up “Everything Everywhere All At Once”, to name just a couple of the bleary-eyed highlights.
While the main MO of I know you’re hurting, everyone is hurting, everyone is trying, you have got to try is to get you to hash it out on the dancefloor, there are some gear switches along the way. Despite being two years old, “Mum Does The Washing” sits at the album’s centre – and serves not only as a deserved victory lap for the song, but brings the tempo down for a moment, acting a bit like a wide-eyed conversation in the smoking area, a dull bass thump in the background. “My Love” is a piano ballad in which Idehen mewls about regrets and yearning for a few reflective minutes. “Brother” is a much more successful diversion, building gradually into an atmospheric, sax-imbued skeletal drum’n’bass track where Idehen is in pump-up mode: “You are valued, you are loved, the winds behind you are still strong.”
Overall, this is an album about shimmying through the shit, frolicking with friends and swinging towards self-actualisation. Does the proselytising on “Choose Yourself” become a bit much? Potentially. Is the choral reprise of “Everything Everywhere All At Once” overkill? Probably. Does the album need three spoken-word interludes and a therapising outro? Not really. But when those beats are descending on the last (proper) song “Turn It Around” and Idehen and his singers are singing about self-redemption, none of that matters – your face will be hurting from smiling.
