Here we are on the bubble of the Top 10 of 2023 with Young Fathers, who were in this exact same position with their phenomenal Cocoa Sugar a short five years ago. Heavy Heavy is the band’s fourth full-length, and it’s every bit as good as Cocoa Sugar.

Not much has changed with the band in the space between these two albums. They still hail from Edinburgh, Scotland, and they are still a trio of men who have now been making music together for 15 years: Alloysious Massaquoi (born in Liberia, moved to Edinburgh when he was 4), Kayus Bankole (born in Edinburgh to Nigerian parents) and Graham 'G' Hastings (born in Edinburgh to Scottish parents). Having been writing and performing together since they were teenagers, the three men dance and spar and finish each other’s musical thoughts like brothers. Watch their KEXP Live Performance from earlier this year to see how they play off each other – the first three songs of the short set see each of them take the lead at various points.

Heavy Heavy is only a short 33 minutes long, with 10 get-in-get-out 3-minute tracks. It’s heavenly. Whereas Cocoa Sugar saw the band adopting more pop-song qualities that allowed them to secure a wider audience, Heavy Heavy has them maturing those same ideas into the best they can be. The song “I Saw,” shown above, achieves a sound somewhere between TV on the Radio and Prodigy. The other video they’ve released, for the song “Tell Somebody,” is an odd choice for a video. It’s gorgeous, don’t get me wrong, but the song feels more like a transition, and bridge between the highlights of the album, “Drum” (song #3) and “Geronimo” (song #5).

When I first heard Young Fathers, I wasn’t sure where they should be stored in my musical file cabinet. Over these last two albums, they’ve shifting up to the front of the drawer that features political rock, hip hop, and hard hitting dance artists. (No such drawer exists – maybe that’s the metaphor I should be painting here: they’ve been moved to a musical drawer all their own). Even if you only kinda liked Cocoa Sugar, I urge you to listen to Heavy Heavy. It contains a half-hour of danceable, singable, catchy as all get-out music that you’ll want to repeat again and again.