release feature

Space Afrika's Quiet Storm Wasn't Named by Space Afrika

A conceptual artist heard the finished record and handed the Manchester/Berlin duo both its cover and its title.

Glenn Ligon didn't write a note of it, but he named the record anyway. Once Space Afrika sent him the finished audio, the conceptual artist responded with two things: his 2009 piece Figure #30 for the cover, and a title borrowed from 1970s radio — the late-night, hand-picked-smoothness format stations once branded quiet storm. Joshua Tarelle Reid and Joshua Inyang kept both, cover and christening intact, on the fourth album from their Manchester/Berlin project and their first since 2021's Honest Labour.

## A Title Borrowed, Not Chosen

Quiet Storm lands September 25, 2026, running 13 tracks. Handing a record's name to someone outside the room is an unusual move for a duo this hands-on with their own identity, and it leaves an open question worth carrying into the tracklist: is a title pulled from a genre built on curated calm meant as a compliment, a contrast, or a dare. Reid, at least, frames the album's underlying work in sharper terms: "We challenged ourselves and our own notions of identity, around class and diaspora, and how that is represented across musical genres." Inyang locates the same tension in method rather than theme: "It's a collaborative record because there is always strength and love in collaboration. But with that, we were able to focus more strongly on our personal identity."

## The Cast They Brought In

That collaboration shows up by name. 2025 Grammy winner Axelle Fanyo opens the album on "Vanity." Danish artist Alto Aria sings on "From The Heart of Knowing," backed by saxophone, cello, and piano from Kelly Moran. British-Nigerian artist Tony Njoku fronts "MLN," with Gabriel Evans on guitar and bass and London's PIKE on drums — a track Inyang calls "a collective slow march" that reaches "the catharsis at the core of the album." The credit list keeps extending outward from there: Vanessa Bedoret, RXKNephew, Klein, Any, Kiala Ogawa, and Deuen all appear, alongside a rotating bench of cellists, violinists, guitarists, and drummers.

The one preview available so far is "If This Is Hell," released June 9, 2026, with Deuén featured. It's built as a single take, riding jazzy, frenetic percussion — the clearest signal yet of how loosely this record is willing to move even with a radio-format title hanging over it.

Quiet Storm also comes with a companion beyond the tracklist: a multidisciplinary film called Opera Omnia, directed by Valentin Noujaim, staged live for audiences at Manchester Camerata as part of Factory International. That's a lot of infrastructure — visual art, film, orchestral venue, festival slot — around a record two people are funding and producing themselves.

Which is the part worth sitting with. Honest Labour won Resident Advisor's album of 2021 and DJ Mag's Album of the Month, credentials that turned Space Afrika into a live act treated as world-class rather than emerging. Five years later, Inyang describes Quiet Storm as a project with "no compromise," born from an idea he calls "a celebration of Black artistry" — and the duo is still self-funding and self-producing it, even while pulling in a Grammy winner, a Danish vocalist, a British-Nigerian collaborator, and a director for an accompanying film. That's not the shape of an act scaling up toward a label system; it's an act proving the system isn't required. The real question Quiet Storm poses isn't what quiet storm radio meant in the 1970s — it's what happens when a duo with this kind of critical weight decides independence is the format they're keeping.

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