Kojaque previews debut album with new track, ‘Wickid Tongues’

Kojaque further previews his much-anticipated debut album Town’s Dead today with brand new track ‘Wickid Tongues’. The album will be released on Different Recordings on June 25, with the visceral title track (and incredible video) recently released to widespread acclaim, following early singles ‘Shmelly’ (as debuted on COLORS) and the moving ‘No Hands’.

Town’s Dead is Kojaque’s follow-up to debut mixtape Deli Daydreams, a concept piece which became the first release of its kind to be nominated for the prestigious Choice Music Prize and took Kojaque everywhere from tours with slowthai and Lana Del Rey to a Boiler Room documentary on the influence of his label and collective Soft Boy. Its latest chapter, ‘Wickid Tongues’, emerged from a night out and freestyle with Biig Piig in London, adding an extra dimension (and emotional rawness) to the chaotic love triangle at the heart of the track…

‘Wickid Tongues’ – says Kojaque – is about “falling too deeply in love with someone a little too fast, and how that can play with your head and make you paranoid. It can be quite hard to build trust early on in any relationship, if you’re not careful I feel it’s easy for your thoughts to run away with you and you become suspicious when there might not be anything wrong.” 

Released this June, Kojaque’s debut album, Town’s Dead, is an expansive and urgent tour-de-force that speeds headlong into sex, violence, depression, and the claustrophobia of your hometown. In this landmark project, Kojaque documents the tumultuous love triangle on the tip of ‘Wickid Tongues’ as it unfolds across New Year’s Eve, with results that are as cinematic as they are deeply personal. Dark corners of parks, bedrooms, clubs, streets, and psyches are excavated, and pouring over the rubble is an artist 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 talent onto streets scaffolded by a broken system but still suffused with love.

Town’s Dead sees Kojaque build a distinct world and invite the listener inside it – and it’s one in which music, film, humour and at times visceral storytelling all go hand in hand. Few contemporary rappers, after all, can claim to be an award-winning film-maker (for his ‘Love In Technicolor’ film), have been invited to talk at Trinity College’s Philosophical Society, or develop work in residence for the RHA Gallery.  Kojaque is part of a new wave of Irish artists making the world sit-up with blistering and sophisticated art – ideas and work that emerged from a social revolution, stonewalled by late-stage capitalism. Welcome to Town’s Dead, where it is – despite everything – New Year’s Eve, the countdown to midnight is on, and Betty’s fella’s got a gun…