SINGAPORE — Jordan Rakei makes highly-anticipated comeback with his fourth studio album, ‘What We Call Life’, released via Ninja Tune.
‘What We Call Life’ is Jordan Rakei’s most vulnerable and intimate album to date, with lyrics concerning the lessons that the New Zealand-born, Australia-raised, and London-based artist learned about himself during therapy, a journey that began two years ago when he started reading about the ‘positive psychology’ movement. Jordan, already a practitioner of meditation and mindfulness, was curious about the potential of using therapy for further self-discovery.
During the process, he began to learn more about his behaviour patterns and anxieties, and addressed his long-standing irrational phobia of birds – a fear often associated with the unpredictable and the unknown, and something explored in the album’s creative direction and visuals.
“As we worked through it, it made me realise I would love to talk about the different lessons I learned from therapy in my music: about my early childhood, my relationship with my parents and siblings, becoming independent in London, being in a new marriage, understanding how my marriage compares to the relationship my parents had,” Rakei shares.
These themes manifest on songs like ‘What We Call Life’s lead single, “Family”, which Jordan comments is “the most personal” he’s ever been with his lyrics. “I wanted to hit my vulnerability barrier and be really honest. It’s about my parents’ divorce in my mid-teens but still having love for them no matter what,” he explains. On “Send My Love”, Jordan sends a dispatch from London (his adopted home since 2015) back to his family in Australia. “It’s a stand for my independence, like saying: I’m fine here, don’t worry about me, send my love back home.”
His latest single alongside his recently released album, “Illusion”, explores notions of determinism vs. free will. “The song is an argument about how much control I have over my mood, my attitude, or even my personality,” Rakei explains of the song.
Similar ideas about nature and nurture, and the way one’s environment can affect the way they live, appear on “Clouds”, a song that Jordan wrote following global conversations that have taken place over the last 18 months around race and discrimination. The track sees Rakei reflect on his own mixed race heritage (his father is a Pacific Islander, his mother white) and the privileges that his light skin has afforded him in western society. “That whole movement made me think about this a lot, and then therapy enabled me to write about it,” he says. “I’d never been that open about this in the past.”
Such introspective subjects are a departure from Jordan’s last album, 2019’s ‘Origin’, which raised big questions about the way that technology and social media interferes with our sense of humanity. ‘Origin’ received praise from notable platforms like TheObserver, Mixmag, Complex, and GQ, earned an unexpected shout-out from Elton John, led to a collaboration with rap legend Common, and saw Jordan give a show-stopping performance for NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert series.
Jordan Rakei has received praise from the likes of The Line of Best Fit, describing ‘What We Call Life’ as “A thought-provoking and utterly compelling collection of tracks, delivered with understated yet captivating style… [it’s] Rakei’s most complete album to date, a rich texture of sounds and concepts, masterfully weaved together by an artist at the top of their game,” and has already garnered huge support for his previous singles in South East Asia, with the introspective track “Family” landing on notable platforms like Hypebeast’s “Best New Tracks” list, JPNN (ID), here and there (TH), Asia Live 365 (SEA) and more.
No stranger to collaboration, Jordan is closely associated with friends and collaborators like LoyleCarner (with whom he co-wrote, produced and performed on “Ottolenghi” and the Jorja Smith-featuring “Loose Ends”), TomMisch and AlfaMist. He has also joined Chic’s Nile Rodgers for a writing session and recorded with Terrace Martin, producer for Kendrick Lamar, Snoop Dogg, and Herbie Hancock.
Besides being a lyrical step forward, ‘What We Call Life’ expands Jordan’s sonic vocabulary too. While the heart of the record will be familiar to fans of his neo-soul and hip-hop-infused work, here he dives deeper into his sound world, merging electronic with acoustic, and rugged grooves with ambient atmospheres, to create something richer, more detailed, and more textural than before.
Unlike previous releases which were crafted from Jordan’s own demos, ‘What We Call Life’ sees him work with his full band throughout the writing process for the first time. Jordan laid down the building blocks of the record with his collaborators over two writing and recording sessions in Wales, before finishing the album with a lengthy solo post-production process at his studio in London over lockdown. ‘What We Call Life’ casts Rakei in the role of an old-school producer, working with a five-person team of core collaborators (Chris Hyson, Jim Macrae, Jonathan Harvey, Imraan Paleker, and Ernesto Marichales all joined him for the recording sessions in Wales) whose own unique musical sensibilities bring Jordan’s vision to life.
‘What We Call Life’s artwork was created by Canadian-born, Los Angeles-based visual artist Justin Tyler Close, who resonated with the themes on Jordan’s new album. The image was created in a remote photo shoot, with Jordan sending images over the internet that were projected onto a sheet and photographed by Justin. The melancholic images reflect the title of the record, a question that Jordan would sometimes ask himself during a period of his childhood in which he suffered a great deal of anxiety: “Is this what we call life?” Rather than accepting defeat, the title is today a commentary on the more happy, confident, and assured person and artist that Jordan Rakei is today.
Listen to Jordan Rakei’s fourth studio album “What We Call Life”: