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Ezra Collective's Here Because of Hope Started With a Man Dancing at Wembley

A Mercury Prize-winning band traces a personal and geographical arc across 17 tracks, guided by one unplanned collaboration and a voice reading between the movements.

Femi Koleoso was watching the crowd at Wembley Arena in 2024 when he spotted Pa Salieu dancing. He didn't file it away as a nice moment. He decided, on the spot, that the two of them needed to make a song together. That instinct became "Only Love," the lead single from Ezra Collective's new album, Here Because of Hope, and it's as good a window as any into how this band operates: they see a room, they read it, and they act on the read. That's drumming logic applied to a whole career.

It's also logic that's paid off. Ezra Collective became the first jazz act to win the Mercury Prize, then followed it with a BRIT Award for Group of the Year — a pairing of trophies that doesn't happen by accident. The five-piece formed in London youth clubs and has spent more than a decade in the same room together: Femi Koleoso on drums, TJ Koleoso on bass, Joe Armon-Jones on keys, James Mollison on saxophone, Ife Ogunjobi on trumpet. That's not a lineup assembled for a project. That's a band that grew up inside its own sound.

## A Bassline That Started in Gambia and Landed in Wood Green

"Only Love" is where the album's ambitions get specific. Koleoso has studied West African and Gambian music, and that study shows up directly in the bassline and drumbeat — not as texture sprinkled on top, but as the song's structural DNA. Layer in euphoric horns and West African-inspired grooves, and you get a track built to move a room, which tracks given its origin story. The session itself happened in Wood Green, a detail worth holding onto: for a band whose album maps a journey across continents, one of its most globally-minded songs was tracked in North London.

Pa Salieu's lyrics complicate the euphoria on purpose. He wrote them during a difficult personal period, and the words carry pain alongside beauty, joy, and love rather than picking one mood and staying there. That tension — a track engineered to feel triumphant, carrying words that don't pretend everything was fine — is the most honest thing about "Only Love," and it's the first time Ezra Collective and Pa Salieu have worked together, which makes the Wembley Arena story more than trivia. It's the actual origin of the song.

## Seventeen Tracks, Three Movements, One Narrator

Here Because of Hope runs 17 tracks across three spiritual and geographical movements, and Ezra Collective has called it the most ambitious and personal record of their career — a claim that's easier to believe once you see the structure. The album traces the movement of Black people across continents and decades, from African music through Caribbean rhythms into London streets, and it's stitched together by transitional passages read by BAFTA-winning actor Letitia Wright. A narrator inside a jazz record is an unusual choice, and it signals that this isn't a collection of singles loosely filed under one title — it's built to be heard as a sequence with a spoken throughline.

The featured cast backs up that geographic sweep. Alongside Pa Salieu, the album pulls in Lila Iké, Leona Lewis, and Libianca — a spread of voices that spans reggae, pop, and Afro-fusion rather than staying inside one lane. For a record that's explicitly mapping movement across places and traditions, casting collaborators from different corners of that map isn't a coincidence; it's the same instinct that sent Koleoso toward Pa Salieu at Wembley, applied at album scale.

Physical-format collectors get their own reason to pay attention: an independent record shop exclusive pressing on translucent white vinyl is available through Cult Hero Records, distinct from the standard release. It's a small detail, but for a band this attentive to how a project is assembled — three movements, one narrator, a bassline sourced from specific regional study — the vinyl variant fits the pattern of a group that treats every format decision as part of the storytelling.

What's most striking about Here Because of Hope isn't any single credential — not the Mercury Prize, not the BRIT Award, not the guest list. It's that a band built inside London youth clubs over a decade ago is now using its most personal record to trace exactly how music travels: from West Africa, through the Caribbean, into the city that raised them. The Wembley Arena moment wasn't a detour from that story. It was the story finding one more place to land.

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