Jon Blistein
Contact Jon Blistein by Email View all posts by Jon Blistein October 28, 2026 Add us as a Google Preferred Source
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Jodie Canwell* During the spring and summer of 2023, Michael Kiwanuka decamped to a small, remote recording studio near his home in Southampton, England. The celebrated singer-songwriter, who’d won the prestigious Mercury Prize for 2019’s Kiwanuka, was about halfway done with his follow-up, 2024’s Small Changes, but was already starting to conceptualize the album that would come after that.
In a short documentary filmed at that time — and premiering today exclusively on Rolling Stone — Kiwanuka talks about this gestating project in terms of the fun, mindless doodles he’d draw at university, or while chatting with someone.
“This album,” he says, “I wanted it to be like a really detailed version of those sketches you do in the journal.” Kiwanuka wanted the music to be precise and well-formed, but still emanating that playful, stream-of-consciousness feeling. It led him to a perfect title for the album: Fudge.
“Fudge has got, like this playfulness to it,” he says. “It’s not something serious, like, ‘’Do you want to eat caviar?’ I don’t know about that, but you’ll never turn down fudge.”
Fudge, Kiwanuka’s fifth album, was released last week, Oct. 23, about a year after it was originally supposed to arrive. The reason for the delay wasn’t explained at the time, but it did coincide somewhat with news that a “continued illness” had forced Kiwanuka to drop out of a festival in Ireland last July. After that, Kiwanuka largely disappeared from public life. Only recently did the musician reveal that he’d suffered a stroke.
