By Elizabeth Chandler
The question isn’t “Will Wesley Joseph make it,” rather “Where does Wesley Joseph channel his energy from?” It's how he writes: energetically, ardently, urgently, with a young artist's impetuousness, and yet with a fastidious devotion that most artists develop later in their careers. Wesley made headlines when he changed the Birmingham, U.K., or the ‘Brummie’ sound. In the LP’s exhilarating centerpiece “Thrilla,” Joseph sings “All of my stress put on a page/ What I possess is in a blaze/ nothing to say, just get out the flame/ Cover your face (Look, look) The energy blessed watch where you step.” There are echoes of modest forbearing of the soul in Wesley’s music-- Frank Ocean, Flying Lotus, Saba-- yet he meets this softer energy with a combination of worlds: that of the human and the supernatural. He is a phantom singer.
Courtesy of GrandStand Media
He’s also his own self, rooted in principles of hip-hop and Grime. Like his OG Horse Collective companions, he writes with an exact sense of place: His tales are laid in sprawling city landscapes, busy, yet casual, teeming with multisensory moods of city dwellers: life and death, love and pain, lost hope and resilience (“my daddy told me to be a good man in the end and it will show / tryna stay afloat / standing on my ten toes proud nobody gets involved/ I’ve seen a couple of snakes slow down now the grass is low”).
Wesley is a subtle storyteller in lyrics, but the power of his world-building arrives in the combination of his 808-drum heavy sound and his self-directed videos. He sculpts and orchestrates worlds with his combination of sound and visuals, enticing listeners with sound and inspiring them with a vision. He translates music’s emotional and improvisational qualities through technical videography with little room for improvisation.
His music touches on future-funk, soul, and down-tempo hip hop; there are smooth hooks, boom-bap-Esque chops, and looping that turn abstract concepts into vivid characters and landscapes. His meticulous detail and instinct for control, combined with his desire to lose control produce an untethering from the ground and his bedroom studio he produced from before his emergence onto the U.K. rap scene.