The Briton, endowed with solid musical foundations, is crafting a hip-hop for tender hearts, suited to easing sorrows and mending wounds.
Unfazed by a hip-hop scene that dares to expose its wounds more than ever, Wesley Joseph has since 2020 consistently pushed further into the catharsis he explores on beats that lean more toward jazz and soul than toward the purely British currents—the grime and the drill.
There is in the Englishman, also a graduate of a film school, the desire to be at once intimate and universal, the will to welcome emotions without ever turning lachrymose, the wish to create a cohesive work, which results less from files swapped on WeTransfer than from a real alchemy between instrumentation, teeming with ideas, and a voice capable of interpreting everything with mastery.
The technique at the service of feelings
On this debut album, as was the case in 2021 with the EP Ultramarine, technique is thus put at the service of vulnerability, the morose moods, heightened by delicately crafted melodies (special mention to Nicolas Jaar on If Time Could Talk) or masked in lyrics bearing a real sense of storytelling.
One sometimes thinks of Bon Iver (July, in a duo with Jorja Smith), at other times of the sentimental choruses of Kali Uchis, whose one producer, Al Shux, is part of the cast of Forever Ends Someday, to the richness of Little Simz’s productions or to the versatile flow of Danny Brown, present on the formidable Peace of Mind. Listening to these thirteen tracks, one thinks above all of Wesley Joseph, the true mastermind behind this rap for sensitive hearts.
Forever Ends Someday (Secretly Canadian/Modulor). Out on April 10. In concert at Main Room, Paris, on May 6.
