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.