Great art always finds its time. Kokoroko’s second LP, though, is unlikely to be a record that’s going to have to wait for its audience catch up with it. Tuff Times Never Last arrives with the UK bouncing between apparently intensifying heatwaves as the geopolitical temperature takes up permanent residence in the danger zone. Wherever you look there’s chaos and crisis, and if answers exist for our myriad global maladies they’re too complicated for our digitally disrupted heads to get themselves around. Each day starts with you feeling like all that’s left is to lash out impotently and ineffectually, or bury your head in the sinking sand. So a record this fresh feeling, this free, and built around a core of determined yet never delusional optimism, has never felt more necessary or more timely. That it comes clothed in the sounds and the imagery of the kinds of steamy city summers that you’d begun to think only ever existed in faultily edited memories is just the icing on the cake. After three years, some significant line-up changes and a subtle reframing of their musical focus, Kokoroko’s second LP is simultaneously a record for the ages and one that’s surely destined to be the defining soundtrack for the summer of 2025.
The sleeve art, by Luci Pina, results from a brief that included nods to Spike Lee’s Crooklyn and John Singleton’s Poetic Justice, and which also recalls such summer-in-the-city touchstones as Corky McCoy’s cover for On The Corner and Paul Simonon’s painting of a punky reggae party in the shadow of Trellick Tower that clothed Big Audio Dynamite’s Tighten Up Vol. 88. But put the record on, and the echoes that sound are more recent. Had Steve McQueen set his Small Axe chapter Lovers Rock in 2025, Tuff Times Never Last would surely provide the house party with the majority of its soundtrack; and while it may have been another band from London’s jazz scene whose second album McQueen appeared on, Kokoroko share with Ezra Collective an unshakable commitment to finding, amplifying and channelling joy.
At first blush, the record sounds like it stands in a venerable Brit-soul tradition, its smooth aesthetic and polished production recalling the likes of Loose Ends, Sade or Incognito. But Kokoroko’s roots in the UK’s absurdly fertile improvised music scene, a rhythm section that clearly grew up under the influence of Dilla, Questlove and Pino Palladino, and the avowed intention of founder members Sheila Maurice-Grey and Onome Edgeworth to draw on West African funk and jazz as a constant source of inspiration, mean that, beneath those buffed-to-a-shine surfaces, the music here is of breathtaking depth, and is filled with an abundance of subtle and meticulous detail.
Take, for just one example, ‘Together We Are’, where a shimmery chorus glides over what could almost be a 1980s Bontempi beat: the moment before you might start to think this is maybe a little light, a touch slight, there’s trumpeter Maurice-Grey, trombonist Anoushka Nanguy and guest saxophonist Chelsea Carmichael engaging in a gentle brass tussle – the instruments laid back yet jostling, an excitable conversation played out in melody, a frank and forthright exchange of views conducted without a voice being raised and with the instrumental equivalents of chuckles and smiles audible throughout. And then, before it feels like it’s hung around long enough to reach its natural conclusion, the piece ratchets itself out of its relaxed register to end in a rising unresolved crescendo, the aural equivalent of an ellipsis followed by a question mark.
This pattern – with the music first enveloping, then hypnotising and ultimately confounding you – is repeated throughout the record, but never feels like a formula and always sounds fresh. Magnificently, almost magically, Kokoroko make light work of their music’s elaborate complexities. Tracks which reveal considerable emotional heft are delivered with a vibrancy and an effervescence that renders the record airy. The combination of heavyweight technique and joyful performance allows each song to soar. It’s quite the trick: on first, superficial acquaintaince you might be forgiven for thinking you’ve heard all this before, but with every play the realisation hits that you’ve never heard anything quite like it.
It’s an album filled with quiet delights, with music that doesn’t need floodlights or fireworks to draw attention to itself. These tracks glow from the inside. The infectious, delirious first single, ‘Sweetie’, embeds short phrases from the brass instruments that call and respond between each other across the soundstage but sit inside the mix, avoiding the temptation to show-offily soar and draw attention away from the whole. Guest vocalist Demae isn’t floating above Ayo Salawu’s syncopated, time-shifting kick and snare-rim pattern and Duane Atherley’s mellifluous, cloudy yet precise bass during ‘Time and Time’: she’s lying back into it and singing the song from inside its beating heart. It’s cohesive and collaborative, virtuoso instrumentalists subsuming themselves to collective need. Throughout, the playing is at once superlative and generous: each musician an expert so completely in command of their craft they know precisely how much of each note, each beat, each sonic element to add or subtract at every moment – and who, collectively, seem to be in unequivocal agreement that less is always more. That said, the approach is never minimalist: there’s a lot to take in here. What’s remarkable is how Kokoroko make sure that every last note sounds absolutely essential.
Just as important are the songs themselves. Ostensibly easygoing relationship fare, the lyrics speak gently but forcefully about the values and attitudes that will help get us through our current climate of conflict, complexity and upended certainties. The opener, ‘Never Lost’, is primarily a love song, its surface-level theme a declaration that a significant other’s presence means all possibilities remain intact (“my dreams are never ever lost with you my dear”). Yet by combining group vocals with an arrangement that manages to be both relaxed and emotionally intense – Tobi Adenaike’s guitar and Yohan Kebede’s keyboards floating in a shimmering sunset haze around a bedrock backbeat Salawu and Atherley build like a dry stone wall – it becomes a hymn to family, community and friendship. Every individual shape is different yet they all fit together into an
indestructible, elemental whole.
In the middle of ‘Closer To Me’ – another song, like ‘Sweetie’, that works, first and foremost, as a document of early-relationship infatuation – there’s a further choral interjection which picks the absorbed listener up and turns their conception around: “I have a tendency to rush, sometimes I lose my patience,” the voices claim, somewhat implausibly amid music that is many things but never hurried. “She told me, ‘Listen to the sea, the sky and the birds’.” And suddenly the song’s power stops relying on your ability to recall the early part of falling in love, and smashes through into the everyday with a force that is unstoppable. These moments keep coming troughout this remarkable record, where these world-class musicians seem to have become emotional alchemists. They take our fears and our worries and, with the force of a sledgehammer and the precision of a surgeon, turn them into hope and joy, then show us how we might set them free.
