Category: Album – 11 tracks, runtime – 37 min
Genre: Electronic
Release Date: 27.Feb.2026
Rating: ★★★★★★★★★★ – 10/10
Since we started out as an outfit in 2024, we’ve never assigned ten stars to a full-length studio album, well… until now! Two things that should demonstrate: For one, we’re not in the business of puff pieces, as restated multiple times. But secondly, what a unit this joint is, sheesh!
For background’s sake, this newest project by Berlin-based Kenyan alt pop enigma, Kabeaushé, is concept-driven, premised on a character dubbed Herr IGGY, sovereign of the Doerf Kingdom. The quirky camp of it all! So anyways, it’s one of them rise-and-fall arcs of a pompous character type thing, with allusions to cinematic works by greats like Sergei Eisenstein, Stanley Kubrick and Ridley Scott. The outworking of Shé’s artistic vision here is less of a chronicling of history, and more of a recontextualization of the psyche of a larger-than-life ruler.
To bask to the max, we’ll have a go at this in a clustered format:
First off with the opener, you’ve got a wordless sonic synopsis, if you will, under three minutes, signalling by texture what will come up over the next ten tracks of the joint. Cue train ride effects, a tense cinematic string arrangement paying off in a fuller angular orchestration, buoyed by anthemic drumkicks of the marching band variety. And just as the whole affair swells to a satisfying grand peak, in typical Shé fashion, dude deflates the buildup with an irreverent affectation of longdrawn spit. Yup, thick spit. Had a tie-in to a metaphor there, but we choose to spare you, cultured readers😂
Our pick for fav track of the joint has to be “WE LIVE FOR FREE”. Shé-core as they come. Spasmically stacked heaps of vocal layers across ringy jolts of a sonic carpet, punctuated with an alluringly delicate lyrical impulse.
In terms of the middle bulk, we were more drawn to a streak of self-referential meta numbers in the cheekily titled “Untitled 1981” and “I DON’T NEED YOU, SO YOU COULD TELL ME IF I’M GUD”. There’s a delightful breaking of the fourth wall that loosens the potentially stretched metaphor that is the tale of the project. Sonically though, it’s the latter piece that seems the fullest. What with the funky churchy bounciness and high-pitched vocal chatterings, accented by them bobby claps, neat!
Amidst all the cheffery, the team back here felt that one of the other subdued-yet-outstanding elements of joint was that swelly piano that’s thankfully floated up to take on the helm on “Before You Say”, and sneaked in on the closer to seal the whole affair.
Nifty and emblematic of the whole intentional lot of numbers on here. Dude cheffed! So much so, we may need a fuller feature to recontextualize this album in his broader catalog.
