I can't resist a concept album, whether good or bad or absolutely baffling. Jake Blount's The New Faith is one of the triumphs. Set a few hundred years from now, the album is imagined as a field recording of a religious ceremony among a group of survivors of climate breakdown.
Combining old Black church spirituals with rap, spoken word and inventive folk arrangements, it's a fantastically ambitious and provocative example of Afrofuturist storytelling as the world hurtles towards what is likely to be a very bleak future. I chatted with Jake over Zoom to dive into the record in more detail. Read our interview over on The Line of Best Fit, published today.
Jake Blount and the Apocalyptic Afrofuturism of The New Faith
On The New Faith, the climate crisis meets Afrofuturist folk in Jake Blount’s richly imagined lost recording from a devastated world. He talks to Best Fit about taking on the wounds of both past and future.
Alan Pedder
