Enigmatic electronic duo LV and Joshua Idehen, one of the most crucial voices in UK club culture, return with Ends, the third and final chapter in their decade-long collaboration. Their first release, the critically acclaimed Routes in 2011 (9/10 – Clash Mag), was celebrated as a masterful London album, “an ode to the city’s dark corners, its citizens and its transport service,” says Idehen, a night bus ride through the city that criss-crossed garage, dubstep, UK funky and astral soul.

Ends picks up that inner-city thread but finds the three musicians weaving through a metropolis in turmoil, a post-Brexit landscape where nationalism and anti-immigrant sentiment are on the rise. It’s an Original Pirate Material for the Black Lives Matter generation, a dizzying, uncategorisable rush of tough polyrhythms, sound system energy and electronic music that pulls both from the shadowy corners of the club and from the futuristic reaches of pop, underneath pulsing meditations on race, mental health, identity and alienation.

LV are Londoners Will Horrocks and Si Williams, who emerged during the mid-2000s as dubstep was intersecting with techno, UK funky and garage, and put out scene-defining releases on respected labels like Hyperdub, Hemlock, Keysound, Soul Jazz and Brownswood. Their electronic music never conforms or sits still, snatching from dub, hip-hop, dancehall and bass, as brightly lit as a motorway on a slow shutter speed. They’ve worked with South African rappers on Hyperdub’s Sebenza release and their track ‘Imminent’ was recently reworked by The Comet Is Coming.

Joshua Idehen, meanwhile, a British-born Nigerian, is the Poet Laureate of the UK jazz/electronic scene – a chameleonic artist, singular voice and, as he puts it, “ranter”. He releases sublime electro-pop as the trio Benin City, has contributed vocals to music by Dan Le Sac and Mercury-nominated albums Channel The Spirits by The Comet Is Coming and Your Queen Is A Reptile by Sons of Kemet. More recently, he formed Calabashed with Alabaster DePlume, a spiritual jazz crew who were recently named a 2021 one-to-watch by NME.

Together they’re a formidable trio, and they’ve come a long way since a chance meeting in 2009 turned into LV soundtracking Idehen’s poem Early Mob with an eerie drone. The recording found its way to Keysound, who immediately commissioned what later became the 38 EP, and soon after that, their debut album Routes. In the decade since, LV + Joshua Idehen remained prolific, and they returned in 2014 with the album Islands, also on Keysound – more assured and adventurous in style and solidifying their reputation within the London electronic scene. “If Routes was a wander into the unknown,” says Idehen, then “Islands was a deeper journey down backyards, alleyways and introspections.”

New album Ends is in some ways far darker, certainly more world-weary, as it wrestles with the uncertainty and polarisation of life today. As Idehen puts it:

“Ends is about Ends, East End, Hackney, where I saw a swastika scratched into a Post Office, and a week later a young Muslim boy turned it into a window, ‘Hackney is my house, innit. This is another window now’. It’s about Morden, the end of the Northern Line where I stood a little too over the gap, contemplating the end of my life. Ends is about endings: marriage, my idea of myself as a ‘Nice Guy”, my belief of Britain as Good and Nazism Is Never Really Coming Back, end of my certainty that things are guaranteed to get better. Ends is about closure.”

The album is a celebration of their friendship but also an interrogation of growing older in a city that’s beginning to seem unfamiliar: “Will London miss me if I left it?” asks Idehen on ‘Somehow’, one of the central songs on Ends and one that feels particularly timely, as people continue to feel alienated from their hometowns during the global pandemic. “I’d grown into a less certain, more weary reflection of who I thought I’d be now,” says Idehen. “I realised, I’ve got to talk about my depression; I’ve got to talk about this horrible timeline we’re stuck in; I’ve got to make some medicine out of all this turmoil, all this defiance and rage.”

The idea was to bottle it all with immediacy, get it down quickly in the heat of the Brexit referendum and Trump’s inauguration. “Let’s do something raw, we said,” Idehen remembers. “Quick, in and out. No faffing about, no editing vocals or changing beats. Let’s make the purest LV and Joshua Idehen record in a single month, we said,” adding with a smile: “This third album has taken five years.”

Ends is worth waiting for. All that attention to detail has resulted in an album that is like little else in 2021, sticky soul one minute; intergalactic Afrobeats the next. Lead single and the first track Idehen wrote for the album, ‘Ancestors’, sets the tone of the album and sees him at his most Mike Skinner – “Naija by way of The Streets” – and underlines his gift for witty wordplay: he’s a “Modern-day Keats writing sad songs in Yeats,” he says, “Full english on my plate / I’m long, not late, mate”. The exceptional ‘Somehow’ pairs that urgent spoken delivery with a galloping broken beat rhythm and gentle keys – it’s a galvanising tune, buzzing with restlessness, urging you to keep going when it feels like times are tough.

Elsewhere, Idehen explores his identity on‘Black On Black’, a tough, metallic celebration of Africanism, black pride and Idehen’s memories of growing up in Nigeria – “afrobeat, chewing sticks, bus drivers smelling of palm wine at New Benin Market”. Then there’s ‘Not My House’, a relentless slice of digi-dancehall sorcery, with a flawlessly slinky beat, as Idehen intones in delicious AutoTune, like a ragga MC, about his dual identity, Nigerian and East Ender. The track evidences Idehen’s gift for delivery: “They say go back to where you came from / They say don’t rise above your station,” he sings, referencing that well-known racist rhetoric, then deadpans: “I got an oyster / I don’t belong in one station.”

‘Now Is The Time’, meanwhile, is about Idehen’s annoyance with his own “armchair activism”. It’s about my “anger at how divided the left sometimes seems, at how capitalism co-opts every progressive advancement and how cynical it has made me,” he explains, and how he felt “torn between doom-scrolling, protesting and voting, and watching everything spiral all the same.”

Other songs on Ends are more inward-looking, where Idehen is grappling with his own dark thoughts. ‘The Jar’, with its sticky, squelchy soul, bravely grapples with his own toxic masculinity; he wrote ‘Somehow’ about depression while on his way to visit his therapist; while ‘Lines In The Sand’ explores the suicidal thoughts that Idehen fought back during a difficult patch a few years back, when his musical projects failed to launch, as well as the helplessness he felt about police brutality and the pursuit of young black men in America. He still can’t listen back to the song yet, but adds: “I’m glad it’s out there."

Ends is a truly innovative album, 10 years in the making, from three artists with something to say – a vibrant, multi-hued manifestation of Idehen’s exceptional, singular voice and LV’s superb, forward-thinking production. It’s about finding a way through these most testing of times, and about coming out the other end stronger. “The irony is I chose to be an artist because I thought it would be easy,” says Idehen. “A decade later it is the hardest of all the jobs I've ever had. It has cost me many friendships and a marriage. But the hardest ends come before better beginnings. Darkest before dawn and all that.”

Tracklisting
Ancestors
Black On Black
Not My House
Lines In The Sand
Somehow
Everyday
Doing This Thing
The Jar
Now Is The Time
Save Me

Written By Kate Hutchinson