MICHAEL KIWANUKA ANNOUNCES NEW ALBUM FUDGE OUT OCTOBER 23
POLYDOR RECORDS/UNIVERSAL MUSIC CANADA
Michael Kiwanuka is set to release FUDGE, his fifth album, on October 23, 2026, via Polydor Records. The album was recorded in Southampton alongside his live band. Its release has been pending for almost twelve months due to Michael’s ongoing battle with ill health, which he addressed directly to fans via social media earlier this week. Read here for more information. With Michael’s blessing and his excitement and pride in the new project, FUDGE now receives its imminent release.
The record also marks a change in personnel behind the glass for the first time since his debut album (2012’s Home Again), with Michael taking the reins of its production rather than his trusted collaborators Danger Mouse and Inflo. Michael took the initial studio recordings to producer Dom Monks (Laura Marling, Big Thief) and his long-standing strings collaborator Rosie Danvers to get the record completed.
FUDGE is the culmination of a particularly rich vein of creativity for Michael, and was written almost concurrently with the writing for 2024’s fourth album, Small Changes. FUDGE became a project in and of itself, without the bells and whistles of a ‘big’ studio but something altogether more homespun. It’s a gorgeous, evocative listen.
Away from any outside pressures, and without the burden or weight of expectation, Michael’s making music purely for the love of it, and has never sounded better.
The animating spirit of FUDGE, Michael Kiwanuka’s fifth album and his most abundantly beautiful, is freedom: from pressure and expectation, from doubt and second-guessing. Hence the title. “When I think of fudge, it’s playful and childlike, which is good for creativity,” he explains. “But also it’s a polite way to say I’m just going to do it.”
Don’t be misled by the fact that FUDGE is Michael’s first album in 13 years without his trusted production team. It’s not a rupture but a parallel lane of creativity — an album that unfolded slowly, and unexpectedly, over three years in tandem with Small Changes. Who does Michael really need to make a sumptuous body of work? It transpires, only he, with the help of his bandmates.
Michael had no intention of making FUDGE alone, but why not? He wanted to stay creative in his own backyard. With Small Changes placed to be the long-awaited follow-up to 2019’s Mercury Prize-winning Kiwanuka, the heat was off. Scrolling Instagram one day during lockdown, he found inspiration in an interview with the late jazz pianist Chick Corea, part of which opens the album: “You have to learn to be certain about what you like, not what you think sounds good to someone else… Whatever you think is beautiful, that’s what’s beautiful, and you have to pursue that.”
First, he needed a space to play. Two friends had a one-room studio not far from his home in Southampton, built out of the rough-and-ready organic material cob. “It looks like a medieval hut,” Michael says. “I needed a creative ecosystem, so I could pop in and do an hour here and there and keep my creative brain awake.” He spent his Mercury money on a console and began filling the room with equipment.
Secondly, he needed a collaborator to lay down some of the instrumentation that he could not. Fortunately, his live band’s multi-instrumentalist Joe Connell lived around the corner. “He can play anything. He’s a one-man machine.”
They called the studio Dreamers and started to invite the rest of the touring band down too. The album really caught fire one day when they were working on some pre-written songs but weren’t getting anywhere, so they returned after dinner with the intention of jamming to see what happened. The result was the languorous seven-minute unfurling of Love in My Heart, which opens up like a flower. It convinced Michael that his experiment wasn’t just some quixotic detour but the genesis of an album.
“It felt moving to me,” he says. “I wanted to share it with other people. That was the eureka moment. It sounds like we’re in Capitol Studios on Vine Street, but we’re actually huddled in this shack outside Southampton.”
The music they were making at Dreamers was looser and more stream-of-consciousness than the songs Michael was writing for Small Changes. Often recorded in a single, flowing take, they ran longer than usual, stretching out their limbs. When Michael felt stuck on one album, he could go back to the other one, and then return refreshed. The more music he made, the more his confidence grew. “I’m always one step away from quitting,” he admits. “My brain’s always saying, ‘You can’t do it, you’re not good enough.’”
Michael was born in Muswell Hill, north London. He released his warm, intimate debut album Home Again in 2012 only to experience a massive crisis of confidence. Stars, with its turbulent fuzz guitar solos, was first recorded as he was emerging from that period (“When I played I used to feel/ Now I don’t feel a thing”) and has finally found a home on FUDGE. “I remember in school music always seemed to make sense,” says Michael. “And then suddenly when it became a job it wasn’t making sense. My love for playing guitar disappeared for a while. It means a lot to me, that song.”
FUDGE is bookended by two songs, Summer Clothes and Swings and Roundabouts, that explore his anxiety about working without the safety net of his long-time collaborators. In fact, the airy Summer Clothes originated as a contender for Small Changes. “It sounds like a break-up song,” Michael says. “It’s me knowing that the creative relationship I have isn’t going to last forever and I’m going to have to find my own road. What do I do then? A lot of this record is working that out.”
The key was doing something new. “I had to do it differently from the last few records, otherwise there was no reason for this record. At some point in each song there had to be outpouring of something that wasn’t overthought. It was almost like someone else was making it.”
FUDGE’s musical touchstones are favourite albums with a sense of play and “unbound” personal expression: the Beatles’ Rubber Soul, Neil Young’s hazy, fluid On the Beach (check the winding guitar on You Sent Me Flying), Frank Ocean’s Blonde (“It doesn’t make sense but it does”) and Shuggie Otis’s psychedelic soul masterpiece Inspiration Information. “That’s probably my favourite record of all time,” Michael says. “It sounds like a child’s mind in an adult. Probably LSD! I feel like I’m hanging out with a friend in playgroup.”
Inspiration Information was overlooked at the time but became a classic, a theme explored on Across the Sky’s McCartney-esque acoustic ruminations: “I know my light someday will die/ And look so golden across the sky.” The softly consoling Drowning in Your Heart calls back to his teenage love of Elliott Smith in its message to someone who’s “so sad they’ll sabotage everything. Someone I knew was doing that. I sat down one day and wrote that tune for them.” On the gloriously anthemic Sing, Michael is addressing his own moments of doubt about whether to keep making music. “It really does make me feel alive to make music and to sing,” he says.
When the songs were ready to leave Dreamers, Michael took them to producer Dom Monks (Laura Marling, Big Thief) and his regular string arranger Rosie Danvers (Coldplay, Adele) to record “the posh stuff”, although some beautiful arrangements were recorded right there in Dreamers by Henry Rankin and Harry Fausing Smith’s string quartet. The artwork by Michael’s old friend Stevie Gee, an award-winning illustrator and animator, is a whole new look. His eye-popping psychedelic cartoon of bright, smiling faces combines puckish innocence with emotional immediacy. It’s very FUDGE.
Michael’s whole approach to making music, his sense of what is possible, has been transformed by FUDGE’s freewheeling adventure. He comes back to Chick Corea’s encouraging words. “You have to work out what you think is beautiful and trust and believe in that. That’s what being an artist is. You’ve got to keep following your nose. Sometimes it doesn’t make sense,” he says, smiling, “but it will.”
Michael Kiwanuka
Fudge
(Polydor Records/Universal Music Canada)
Release Date: October 23, 2026
Pre-Order/Pre-Save FUDGE HERE
Artist Links
Illustration Credits: Stevie Gee
