EZRA COLLECTIVE

 + Support: JOY (ANONYMOUS)

Ezra Collective's Here Because Of Hope is the most ambitious and personal record of their career - conceived as a body of work split into three spiritual and geographical movements, the album traces the movement of Black people across continents and decades, from the music of Africa to the rhythms of the Caribbean, and home to the streets of London. Formed in the youth clubs of London, Mercury Prize and BRIT Award- winners Femi Koleoso, TJ Koleoso, Joe Armon-Jones, James Mollison and Ife Ogunjobi have now spent over a decade making jazz joyful, urgent and undeniable. On Here Because Of Hope, they push that vision further than ever, asking a simple but profound question: why does so much Black music born out of pain sound so joyful? Their answer is hope: the belief, carried across generations and oceans, that something better is possible. Anchored by collaborations with Pa Salieu, Lila Iké, Leona Lewis, and reaching across the full breadth of the global African diaspora (including America, where those same African and Caribbean roots gave birth to jazz itself) Here Because Of Hope is a record of remarkable warmth, ambition and humanity, and the sound of Britain's most vital band at the peak of their powers.

Lead single "Only Love" is the perfect introduction to the world of Here Because Of Hope. The song opens with a lone trumpet line that sounds like a signal sent skyward across generations, continents, genres before settling into a groove that is pure Ezra Collective: jazz and hip-hop locked together in something immediate and irresistible.

The song features UK/Gambian rapper Pa Salieu, whose verse is a masterclass on the album's central thesis. He moves through poverty, incarceration, and grief ("people I love die while I'm locked up in a cage") with the unflinching honesty of someone who has lived every word, before arriving at the only conclusion that makes sense of all of it: "it's only love deep inside my soul." It's a distilled expression of what this record is actually about - the idea that hope isn't naïve, it's what you find on the other side of everything.