Michael Kiwanuka – “Summer Clothes” [Video]

Video · Polydor Records

Michael Kiwanuka’s “Summer Clothes” Is a Lush, Unhurried Welcome Back

Britain’s finest soul singer returns with the first track from FUDGE, his self-produced fifth album arriving October 23 via Polydor Records.

After a difficult stretch that kept him away from the stage, Michael Kiwanuka is back, and “Summer Clothes” is as graceful a return as anyone could hope for. The opening track from FUDGE is gorgeously unhurried: lush with orchestration, rich with soul, and carrying the kind of emotional weight that Kiwanuka has always made feel effortless. There’s a hint of late Scott Walker in the delivery, that rare combination of understated restraint and total conviction, and it opens the album exactly right.

FUDGE marks a significant shift in how Kiwanuka made the record. For the first time since his 2012 debut Home Again, he took the producer’s chair himself, working from a makeshift studio in Southampton before bringing the recordings to producer Dom Monks (Laura Marling, Big Thief) in Frome, and to longtime strings collaborator Rosie Danvers. The result is something more homespun than his work with Danger Mouse and Inflo, but no less layered for it. Written concurrently with 2024’s Small Changes, the album found its own identity: quieter, more interior, built on the principle that beauty is whatever you actually believe is beautiful.

The video, directed by Yout, was inspired by the local tailors of Southampton and the quiet creativity that can exist in an ordinary moment. It’s a personal celebration of the instinct to make things, to find beauty in the everyday, which is exactly the spirit the album was made in. All live dates remain on hold indefinitely as Kiwanuka continues to prioritize his health.

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1Summer Clothes

2California

3Just Another Moment

4Drowning In Your Heart

5Love In My Heart

6Across The Sky

7Stars

8You Sent Me Flying

9Move In My Direction

10Steve’s Paradise

11Sing

12Swings And Roundabouts