In November 2024, Michael Kiwanuka released Small Changes — a self-assured, unhurried record made in LA with Danger Mouse, Inflo, Pino Palladino, James Gadson, and Jimmy Jam. It was praised in exactly the adjectives you'd expect: meditative, poised, elegant. What nobody knew was that a second album had been recorded simultaneously, in a studio described as looking like a medieval hut, in Southampton, with his live band, and no famous names anywhere in the credits. Fudge was announced in 2025, reviewed in a handful of heritage rock magazines, then vanished from release schedules without explanation. The explanation arrived late: Kiwanuka suffered a stroke. He is currently in residential care in Hampshire. He is releasing Fudge now, he says, because he doesn't know when he'll be able to release another record. That sentence lands differently once you've heard songs on this album pondering his career uncertainty — Sing, Stars, Across the Sky — which were written before any of this happened. The album opens with Chick Corea being interviewed: "You have to be certain what you like, not what you think sounds good to someone else." It's a pointed start, and you can read the whole record as a private declaration of independence — Summer Clothes, the opening track, functions as a warm but firm farewell to Danger Mouse and Inflo, its lyric "I'm OK, I found another way" clear-eyed rather than bitter. The hut aesthetic shows: there's audible tape hiss, Across the Sky begins mid-chord as if someone hit record too late, the codas of Just Another Moment and Stars circle one chord sequence long past the point where a professional would have called time. None of this is a problem. What's striking is how the roughness coexists with genuine lushness. Love in My Heart wraps a vintage drum machine and Timmy Thomas organ stabs inside string arrangements that are, frankly, beautiful. Steve's Paradise has a lambent melancholy in its organ coda. Stars ends with Kiwanuka's guitar chafing against its own opulent strings in a way that feels earned rather than designed. The jammed origins are audible in the extended endings, but the songs themselves — California, You Sent Me Flying, the title-adjacent warmth throughout — are melodically more memorable than anything on Small Changes. It's worth being honest about what this is not. It is not a radical departure. It is not an experimental record. The Chick Corea framing slightly overpromises on that front, suggesting something stranger than what follows. This is Michael Kiwanuka making a warm, psychedelically-tinged soul-folk record with his band in a room, and the biggest risk he takes is trusting the room over the studio machine. That risk pays off, but it's a moderate one. The biographical circumstances don't transform the music, but they do sharpen it. Songs about career uncertainty and the difficulty of knowing your own direction — written by someone who was about to face something far larger than a creative crossroads — are not the same songs they were before. The plain-spoken lyrics that might have read as modest now read as quietly prescient. You Sent Me Flying and Drowning in Your Heart feel warm in a way that's hard to fully account for without the context. Fudge could have come out as a straightforward Kiwanuka album, no footnotes required, and held its own. The fact that it arrives instead as a document of a specific creative moment — someone who briefly doubted himself making something instinctive and alive, before everything changed — gives it a weight that purely formal analysis can't quite reach. Hope for more.
