The last time we’d heard from Young Fathers, the Mercury Music Prize winners had just released their incredible 2018 album, Cocoa Sugar, and dropped the prescient video for “Toy,” which depicted some of the more despicable world leaders as children. Their hiatus lasted longer than expected given the circumstances surrounding the pandemic, but it gave Young Fathers an opportunity to get back in the studio without an agenda. “Geronimo” is the first song that the trio of Alloysious Massaquoi, Kayus Bankole, and G. Hastings completed, and it’s another beautiful, visceral piece of music from the always affectatious group.
“I’m on the verge of something divine that’s gonna keep me alive,” they harmonize on the song’s bars. The slow-burning rhythm is tinged with a steel drum and it just feels like a long-awaited, cathartic outpouring. “It’s a track about contrast because life is contrast — pushing through, giving up, all at the same time,” the band said in a powerful statement, which you can read in full below.
We highly recommend you smash that play button on “Geronimo” above.
“A good time trying. That’s what Ma said, she was smiling, but it was meant as a warning.
It’s a track about contrast, because life is contrast – pushing through, giving up, all at the same time. Wanting everything and then wanting nothing, then wanting everything again. It’s kind of reflective of where we are at the moment, trying to remember how to do this again.
Trying to make music and all of the other stuff that comes along with it. Trying to forget all the bad bits, just trying to get somewhere. And that’s where we are right now, trying to get somewhere.
It’s the tenderness in toil, we had expelled a bunch of stuff with a lot of drive and wilder energy beforehand but this one had focus. It widened the scope again for us personally, that’s where the real high comes from. We grew another arm. We surprised ourselves.
So coming back with a track called ‘Geronimo’ feels quite fitting. Just the 3 of us again, but still in a f*cking basement.”
