Michael Kiwanuka FUDGE Album Due in October, Self-Produced for First Time in Over a Decade

There is a seven-minute song at the heart of Michael Kiwanuka FUDGE album that, by Kiwanuka’s own account, changed the nature of the entire project. ‘Love in My Heart’ was not planned, it emerged from an improvised session after a scheduled recording day was abandoned, and the moment it took shape, Kiwanuka recognised that what he had been making was not a side project but a proper album. That origin story tells you something about the record’s character before you’ve heard a note.

FUDGE, Kiwanuka’s fifth full-length, will be released on 23 October via Polydor. It carries 12 tracks and arrives as, in production terms at least, a marked departure: according to Pitchfork, it is his first self-produced effort since his 2012 debut. His previous three records were made with Danger Mouse and Inflo, collaborators whose influence shaped the lush, orchestral weight of those releases. Working without them, and without the infrastructure their involvement implies, represents a real shift in how Kiwanuka is choosing to operate.

From Southampton to Frome: How FUDGE Came Together

Much of the record was built at Dreamers, a one-room studio close to Kiwanuka’s home in Southampton, where he worked alongside multi-instrumentalist and live-band member Joe Connell. The setting matters: a small room with a single collaborator is a very different creative environment from the sessions that produced, say, KIWANUKA or Love & Hate. Kiwanuka began developing the material here while simultaneously writing 2024’s Small Changes, the two processes running in parallel before FUDGE asserted its own identity.

The album’s title captures that looseness of approach. ‘When I think of fudge it’s playful and childlike, which is good for creativity,’ Kiwanuka has said. ‘But also it’s a polite way to say I’m just going to do it.’ The reference points he has cited are instructive: the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, Neil Young’s On the Beach, Frank Ocean’s Blonde, and Shuggie Otis’ Inspiration Information. That is a list united less by genre than by a certain quality of self-determination, of artists making records on their own terms, often at a remove from industry expectation.

After the Dreamers sessions were established, Kiwanuka brought the recordings to producer Dom Monks, whose credits include Laura Marling and Big Thief, and to longtime string arranger Rosie Danvers. String arrangements recorded at Dreamers by Henry Rankin and Harry Fausing Smith’s quartet are also woven through the album. The finished record was completed in Southampton and Frome, though an ongoing period of ill health delayed its release for close to a year after completion.

Michael Kiwanuka FUDGE Album: Tracklist and Artwork

The 12 songs include ‘Summer Clothes’, ‘California’, ‘Drowning in Your Heart’, ‘Across the Sky’, ‘Stars’, ‘Sing’, and the closing track ‘Swings and Roundabouts’. Artwork was created by illustrator and animator Stevie Gee.

Across his career, Kiwanuka has moved steadily from the warm acoustic intimacy of his debut toward denser, more layered productions, culminating in the Mercury Prize-winning KIWANUKA in 2019. FUDGE does not appear to reverse that journey so much as step sideways from it, returning to the self-direction of those earliest recordings while retaining the expanded palette he has since acquired. The seven-minute sprawl of ‘Love in My Heart’ as the album’s ignition point suggests an artist content to follow a recording wherever it leads, without the safety net of established collaborators shaping the outcome.

Whether that instinct produces the record it promises to be will be clearer when FUDGE arrives on 23 October via Michael Kiwanuka‘s page at Polydor. For now, the provenance alone, one room, one collaborator, an accidental seven-minute centrepiece, and a producer returning to self-sufficiency for the first time in over a decade, gives the project a shape that distinguishes it clearly from anything he has released before.