From the outside, London-born poet and rapper Kojey Radical is on top of the world right now. He sits before me in a swanky hotel lobby, dripped out, with about as many rings on his fingers as accolades in his career – a critically-acclaimed debut album, multiple singles on the FIFA soundtrack, and the promise of champagne wherever he goes. But, on the inside, uncertainty has begun to creep in. Now in his thirties, and a father, recently Kojey has been wondering when the celebrations end – or, worse, whether they’ll continue without him.

“Sometimes you have to ask yourself, what are we actually celebrating? By the fifth cheers, we’ve run out of things to toast to, and now we’re all just contemplating how odd life is right now,” he tells me. “We’re all just working out one section of life at a time, and you never really know what the next phase will be. But it’s like people go: ‘Life, ten mark question, show your working out’.” Kojey laughs and shakes his head.

Well, on the spoken-word opening to Kojey’s second album, Don’t Look Down, released today, that working out sees the six-time Mercury Award nominee sitting on the toilet, hiding from a celebration in his name. The murmur of conversations and glasses clinking echo in the background while Kojey sits alone, trying to talk himself into being the life of the party for the umpteenth time. Ironically, it is worrying about losing the party that causes Kojey to miss it entirely and it is here that the central tension of the album emerges: Don’t Look Down now that you’ve climbed so high, but, also, Don’t Look Down when everyone’s expecting you to be happy.

In some form, this theme has been present throughout Kojey’s entire career, with almost all of his project covers depicting him in a different state of suspension. “I’ve been playing with the falling motif a little bit since [2019 EP] Cashmere Tears – on that, I’ve just landed on the ground and, on [debut 2022 album] Reason To Smile I’m ascending,” he explains. “Don’t Look Down is the closest I’ve felt to falling, it’s like, have I floated so far away from the people I came from that there won’t be someone there to catch me?” I point out that it’s almost like a career in reverse, an uncertainty that’s only grown throughout his releases. “Essentially,” he replies. “I’m still up there, but I don’t know which direction I’m going in anymore.”

Don’t Look Down is driven by this cognitive dissonance – yet it’s also his most harmonious project yet. Lead single “Conversations” paradoxically urges Kojey to have a quiet conversation with himself while frenetic jazz production simulates a party in full swing. Elsewhere, the second verse to “Life of the Party”, found Kojey during a moment of reckoning in the VIP section of an upmarket Sydney nightclub: “I live in fear of all this starting again, and again, I don’t know who to trust, I’ve got too many friends,” he raps over pensive hip-hop production. With executive assistance from Ezra Collective’s Femi Koleoso and multiple longtime collaborators, these tracks are the sonic manifestation of a celebration that never ends, and a life that does.

Many of these experiences were well behind Kojey by the time we sat down in that hotel lobby, and he’s since been able to put some of these anxieties to rest. Throughout our conversation, he frequently referred to himself as a ‘civilian’: “You know that button you hit when you cross the road? I identify with that green man, I’m playing it safe!” he tells me, laughing. Far from looking down at all he can lose, or up at what’s to come, nowadays, Kojey seems to be looking straight ahead – at his responsibilities as an artist, and as a father. Meanwhile, on Don’t Look Down, the party definitely carries on.

Below, Kojey Radical breaks down the stories behind five of his most personal tracks, including that fated moment in a Sydney nightclub that inspired the project.

“LIFE OF THE PARTY”

Kojey Radical: “‘Life of the Party’ was the initial name of the album. I wrote the second verse – where I’m like: ‘I need Patròn over Casamigos, I’m trying to feed my people, a couple bitches in my section wearing something see-through…’ – when I was in Sydney. Again, I’m a civilian, I don’t like too much, you know what I’m saying? When we got there, the promoter was like, ‘Yo, we can come pick you up from the airport with Jeeps and do a ride out!’ I’m like, ‘Nah, Uber’s fine.’ Then, they’re like, ‘There’s a club that wants you to do a walk-through. They just want you to be in the club for a little bit, they’ll get you a section and they’ll pay you in cash’. I was like, ‘That’s money just to walk, I’m having that!’

“The section was empty at first, and a guy comes over and says, ‘Do you want me to fill it up?’ I blink and then suddenly there’s girls everywhere, all dressed up, see-through tings, tight-up everything. I know they don’t know whose section they’re in. I’m walking around introducing myself normally – ‘Hi, my name’s Kojey’ – until the guy from the bar comes over and is like, ‘What are you drinking?’ I’m regular, you know, I’ll drink the tequila with the sombrero hat on it but, before I can answer, another guy goes: ‘No, he doesn’t drink Casamigos, he’ll have Patròn.’ The bottle comes over with the sparklers and my name on the lights and everything, and then all these girls suddenly realise that it’s my section. The energy changes, everyone’s onto me now. I can’t blame no one, everyone’s trying to make a movie out of their life, the celebrity, the cloutiness, it just is what it is.

“While this is all happening, I’m thinking of everybody back home, people stuck in prison stuck on a loop, the world starts to feel like it’s closing in. That was the first realisation point for me on the album where I feel the need to return home and figure out what’s happening. I need to understand why I feel so separate from everything that I should be close to. On that song, I rap: ‘I live in fear of all this starting again and again, I don’t know who I can trust, I’ve got too many friends.’ It’s like I don’t know how many lives I’ve got left to keep starting again, so I need to make the most of this one.”

“CONVERSATIONS” 

Kojey Radical: “‘Conversations’ starts with a drum loop from Pocket Queen – she’s an amazing drummer from America. She done some sessions with Swindle, so Swindle had a drum pack of maybe two hours of just her playing the drums. We took eight bars and started looping it. Tay Ehwa was there and our minds went straight to ‘Millionaire’ by Kelis, we wanted that kind of energy. Tay Ehwa came up with the hook, and then we got MNEK to layer it – broski, he didn’t even check his takes back once! He just played it on loop and did every layer of the chorus in one take. We got a choir to sing on top of that and then for the string sections we got Neil Waters – longtime collaborator of mine who always finds a way to get it.

“Writing that song, I was trying to capture the angst of life right now and that transition between your 20s and your 30s, people expecting you to have it figured out. That song feels like a high speed chase, trying to chase the rest of your adulthood. We’re all having to become activists and politicians nowadays – as we should, the future is in the hands of young and we can’t rely on the old vanguard anymore – but, at the same time, no one taught us how to do that. It’s a war cry, really.”

“BABY BOY” 

Kojey Radical: “The song was started by Chrissy Lou – she wrote this insane hook, but it was about a boy that she liked. I asked her to change one sentence, and all of a sudden it felt like it was about a child. Me and Owen Cutts were trying to chop it into a Dipset ‘Oh Boy’-type sample but it felt really forced. As we were listening to it we went into this long conversation about co-parenting for maybe two hours, and we ultimately landed on this idea that sometimes you have to choose your own happiness in order to best serve the people that you need to serve, which is your children. He was like, ‘Bro, that’s the record that we need to write,’ but I kept stalling and putting it off. It was really asking me to go there.

“One day, JD.Reid locked me in the library room with the mic and the beat running on loop and said: ‘You’re gonna write this today.’ When we listened to it back, we was like, ‘OK, this is a deep one.’ Initially, we wanted Ghetts on ‘Rule One’ and Swindle was like send him ‘Baby Boy’. He sent it back a week later, and even called me about it like, ‘Yo if you want me to redeliver it, I’ll redeliver it because I’ve got a subdued energy on it, but I just felt that that’s the way I’d talk to my son.’ When I listened, I was like ‘Perfect, bro.’ On the production side, Owen went out of his way to find all the people that were working on the album that were dads and got them to do additional production. He wanted it to be a song about fatherhood, made by fathers.”

“KNOCK KNOCK”

Kojey Radical: “This scenario of being locked away from a party that is in celebration of you, but you’re just not in the mood to celebrate anything, let alone yourself – I struggle with that a lot. I’ll achieve things all the time and forget I did it the same day. It’s like, ‘Who’s online now?’ Jump on Discord and I’m zoning out. The girl who plays the voice of love on the album is called Joy Sunday. We actually found her on TikTok – she was doing voice acting of the Siri voice or ITV News and stuff like that. I hit her up, and she came and she added some little lines in the background – there’s a point where she’s like ‘Move Darren!’, or, if someone’s at the bar getting a drink, that’s her again. Having that additional voice was meant to represent anxiety. 

“I wrote ‘Knock Knock’ last. We had a different intro – it was an MF Doom flip – but we swapped it. Even when my boy’s knocking like, ‘What’s taking you so long?’ That’s what I felt like with people waiting for this album – I’m in the bathroom trying to get my thoughts together and they’re like, ‘We need more music’. There’s a lot of hidden messages in that intro poem, for sure.”

“WATER FEAT. MAHALIA”

Kojey Radical: “September 30 is the anniversary of me and Swindle meeting in Moscow, standing in the snow. When we got back, we got in the studio. The first song we made was ‘Coming Home’, and the next was ‘Water’. I’d initially written it as a poem and tried to rap it, but Swindle was like, ‘Just say it with melody.’ This was before I’d ever considered using my voice in a singing way. So much was happening at the time – the lead poisoning crisis in Flint, Michigan, the church shootings – and I was just like, ‘What is happening?’ Originally, we had a verse from Eva Lazarus on the record, and she was dope, but we were just looking for something else.

“I did a show at Afropunk and got talking to this lady outside. Midway through this conversation, she’s like, ‘You need to meet my daughter’. She dragged me through the whole festival and, when we get to the room, it’s Mahalia. You could tell she was stressed and trying to get ready for her performance, so I was just like, ‘Oh, um, hey nice to meet you.’ Later, Swindle was like, ‘I think Mahalia would be cold on this’, but I was like, ‘I only met her once and I don’t think that interaction was enough to warrant her doing the tune.’ Anyway, I reached out, she done it, and Mahalia blowing at the time up got a lot of new eyes on my music. It was the start of a really beautiful lifelong friendship, and that record genuinely changed my life. I was ready to make it my swan song and get out while it’s good, and then the record caught [on] and I was like, ‘Well, I can’t leave the game alone…’”

Don’t Look Down is out now.