Tony Njoku - Our New Bloom (2022) Hi-Res

After a time recuperating and resetting himself, Tony Njoku is ready to return to the stage with a new record, live band (unprecedented for him) and a newfound calm. Here, he candidly talks sobriety, his process and performing live.

If you listen to Tony Njoku, you will remember his voice; there’s no way around that, especially as it’s the only constant in a canon of work that is equal parts expressive and strange. A textural obsessive, Tony has toyed with his vocals throughout his career. Deploying, rupturing, and smothering them with synthesised sounds to reflect his ideas and condition at a particular moment in time.

Since discovering his third album, Your Psyche’s Rainbow Panorama by way of his Justine EP in 2020, I pondered what kind of person would design and manufacture such intense works on their own and what they would expect their audience to take away from them. It was pleasing to see that Tony is just an amiable grafter, still willing to talk to me across Zoom despite wrestling with COVID. We quickly get into his new release, Our New Bloom, which sees Tony incorporating live instrumentation and more recognisable structures.

“I think with Your Psyche’s Rainbow Panorama, a lot of those songs started off in very different places from where they ended up,” he explains. “[Our New Bloom] is a bit more straightforward, which is nice. It was a much more methodical process: ‘I know I want this guitar part. I know I want these strings.’ I didn’t have these things in my studio, so I had to reference things electronically and then give them to the other musicians I worked with.”