Town’s Dead

Kojaque is part of a new wave of Irish artists flooding the world with blistering and sophisticated literature, film and music – ideas and work that emerged from a social revolution stonewalled by late-stage capitalism. Welcome to that state of mind, where the path less travelled is the only one worth taking. Town’s Dead is a mind-bending, explosive and expansive trip, documenting a tumultuous love triangle that unfolds across New Year’s Eve in a place where gentrification poses as much a threat as the violence of street dealers. Sonically, the record smashes any previous expectations, stretching an aural palate that leaps from rage to solace, from clattering musical combustions to tender ruminations. The tremendous scope and scale of Town’s Dead demonstrates an artist utterly untethered to assumptions about what a particular voice or genre should be, and instead explores radical musical territory. Dark corners of parks, bedrooms, clubs, streets, and psyches are excavated, and pouring over the rubble is an artist who refuses to conform, unafraid of the vulnerabilities that are exposed when the voice rings true, because there’s just no point in being anything else. Through breakups and breakdowns, Town’s Dead teeters on the brink, spilling from the mind of a singular artist, onto streets populated by broken hearts and scaffolded by a broken system. This is a siren, traversing the stoned fuzz of isolation, the whiplash of complicated relationships, the frustrations and euphoria of love, the mundanity of monotony, the demented gaslighting of gentrification, and the hope that can still emerge from the burned-out beauty of it all. In an album liberated from the constraints of genre, the title track rages against the social cleansing of working class neighbourhoods. Sex N Drugs pairs the ennui of a late night piano lounge with an even later night lonely spliff-lighting spooning session. Curtains is an epic within an epic, an internal musical and lyrical dialogue powered by a locomotive engine bursting towards the light at the end of the tunnel.