BERWYN has announced his hotly-anticipated debut album ‘WHO AM I’ and shared moving new single, ‘DEAR IMMIGRATION’.
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Following the release of the powerful single ‘I AM BLACK’, the new album offers what is described as a “vivid and vulnerable journey through BERWYN’s search for meaning and freedom”.
News of the NME Award-winning singer-rapper’s debut is accompanied by the release of ‘DEAR IMMIGRATION’, a spoken word battle cry against a corrupt immigration system.
On the song, BERWYN sings: “You make me look at the mirror in horror, you took my tomorrow / I want you to know since I was nine I felt like a crime / I used to imagine you coming for me every day of my life” – watch below.
His lyrical honesty has become a signature of his sound, which he previously told NME was “a double-edged sword“, saying: “The sick part about it all is that for my day job I stand up on a wooden stage and people are like ‘Your life is hard? Tell me more. Give me more.’”
But that hasn’t put the Trinidad-born artist off being emotionally frank, with his debut studio album promising “crafted and cohesive reflections on faith, on the tugs of addiction and the embrace of love, on what it means to be demonised for your immigration status or skin colour”.
In 2021, the Mercury Prize nominee told NME his work was intentionally “solemn, musical and explorative,” going on to say these attributes were “tools relative to every human being inside of the matrix we live in.”
The debut album follows BERWYN’s EP, ‘Bulletproof’, and two previous mixtapes, ‘Demotape/Vega’ and ‘Tape 2/Fomalhaut’, which NME wrote had “a beautiful twilight quality” in a four-star review.
‘WHO AM I’ is out on July 12 via Columbia Records. You can pre-save the album here.
BERWYN ‘WHO AM I’ album artwork. Credit: Ellis Earl
The ‘WHO AM I’ tracklist is:
‘BAD THING’
‘WHO AM I’
‘I AM BLACK’
‘ALL SHE EVER WANTED’
‘HATE’
‘DEAR IMMIGRATION’
‘NEIGHBOURS’
‘MEET ME BY THE RIVER’
‘I’M DROWNING’
‘LOVE IS BLIND’
‘WITHOUT YOU’
‘MAMA’
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