Michael Kiwanuka: Fudge review – rough and instinctive, but also lush and alive with melody

In November 2024, Michael Kiwanuka released his fourth album, Small Changes, an extremely poised and self-assured piece of work. After three gold albums, a Grammy nomination, a Mercury prize win and the ongoing success of Cold Little Heart, a 2017 single hoisted to virality and million-selling status in the US after its use in TV drama Big Little Lies, Kiwanuka – and his long-term production collaborators Danger Mouse and Inflo – evidently felt confident enough to release a beautiful but wilfully understated album. Recorded in LA, some impressive names lurked in the credits: legendary session musicians including bassist Pino Palladino and the drummer James Gadson, who played on Marvin Gaye’s I Want You and Donald Fagen’s The Nightfly; the similarly legendary R&B producer Jimmy Jam served as organist on three tracks. It attracted the kind of critical praise in which adjectives like “unhurried” and “meditative” figured heavily.

But it also wasn’t the whole story. It turned out there was a second album, its songs written – or rather, jammed into existence by Kiwanuka and members of his live band – concurrently with Small Changes. It was made not in LA but in a studio that “looks like a medieval hut” in Southampton. August session musicians and legendary R&B producers were not present during its recording, nor were Danger Mouse and Inflo. Indeed, you could read its opening track, Summer Clothes, as a kind of Dear John letter to both of them (“I’m OK, I found another way … we’ll be back here soon, just not today”).

Fudge’s release was announced in 2025, hard on the heels of Small Changes: it was reviewed in a handful of heritage rock magazines. Then it just disappeared from the schedules without explanation, until the end of last month, when Kiwanuka made a statement and gave an interview to the Guardian, explaining that he had a stroke. After months in hospital, he is now in residential care in Hampshire. He is belatedly releasing Fudge, he said, “because I don’t know how long it will be until I can release another record”.

It opens with a recording of jazz pianist Chick Corea being interviewed: “You have to be certain what you like, not what you think sounds good to someone else,” he avers. It feels like a bullish, abandon-your-preconceptions-now start, but that perhaps tells you more about the pressures brought to bear on artists in the mid-2020s than the actual contents of Fudge.

It’s certainly rougher around the edges than Small Changes – there’s a lot of audible tape hiss, the acoustic Across the Sky starts abruptly in the middle of a chord, as if someone frantically hit the “record” button after Kiwanuka started playing – but it’s by no stretch of the imagination a confounding WTF? gesture destined to baffle Kiwanuka’s audience.

Never self-indulgent … Michael Kiwanuka and collaborators. Photograph: Jodie Canwell

There’s a pleasingly gritty, live-in-the-studio quality to the performances, but there are also beautiful, impressively luscious string arrangements: there’s a particularly lovely example weaving around the vintage drum machine and Why Can’t We Live Together?-style organ stabs of Love in My Heart. You can probably make out the songs’ origins as jams from the extended codas of Just Another Moment or Stars, where Kiwanuka and his band linger on one endlessly repeated chord sequence, but these moments never smack of noodling self-indulgence. Rather, they feel vivid and alive, the sound changing as they proceed. There’s a lambent melancholy to the organ-driven coda of Steve’s Paradise, a spikiness about Kiwanuka’s guitar soloing at the climax of Stars that chafes against the track’s opulent strings. Indeed, whatever their genesis, the songs here might be melodically stronger than those on Small Changes: whether they’re doleful (as on California) or lovestruck (You Sent Me Flying), the tunes are uniformly memorable.

Indeed, you’re left thinking that Fudge could probably have been released as the new Michael Kiwanuka album, with no explanation of its genesis, without spooking any horses. Certainly, it’s as abundant in the kind of qualities you might have come to expect from its author. Warm and unforced, it occasionally takes on a distinctly lysergic cast – the final minutes of Love in Your Heart are dense with psychedelic guitar effects – and the lyrics are plain-spoken and believable, whether putting a concerned arm around the shoulder of a troubled friend on Drowning in Your Heart or expressing uncertainty about his career, a theme that keeps cropping up, on Sing, Stars and Across the Sky.

Of course, those songs that ponder Michael Kiwanuka’s future in music take on a slightly different resonance, given what’s happened since he recorded them. But on the evidence of Fudge, you do wonder at the crisis of confidence he describes. It may have had experimental beginnings, but it sounds remarkably like the work of a man who knows exactly what he wants to do. You leave it hoping that he’s able to continue doing it at some point in the not-too-distant future.