I meet Wesley Joseph at the Barbican on a snowy January morning. Quickly talk turns to the new Timothée Chalamet flick Marty Supreme as we settle into our seats. I mention that it seems to have been divisive – was the titular lead ruthless or just driven? “Nah, my brain works the same way so I totally get it,” responds Joseph. It was only as the conversation progressed that I truly grasped what he meant: Wesley Joseph is a dreamer in the biggest sense.

With the release of new FIFA 2026-playlisted dark rap cut “Peace of Mind feat. Danny Brown” today, Joseph kicks off the campaign for his debut album Forever Ends Someday. Following almost three years after 2023 EP Glow, hundreds of millions of streams online, and a sold out headline tour in America, ‘debut’ almost seems redundant – Joseph’s career is already in full-swing. But, true to his words, Joseph is playing the long-game.

“It was like I’d been living in a separate reality, living and breathing my art, and slowly it became more and more tangible,” the 28-year-old explains of the run-up to today’s announcement, arranging his hands in various shapes to fully convey the breadth of his ideas. “I was like, ‘Oh this is how far things can go with attention to detail and making a world that people can get lost in’. I took a real sober look at what this album needed to be. It’s the preface to the next 20 years for me, I have so many dreams that stem from this moment in my life.”

Joseph’s journey started in Walsall, a small working-class town in the West Midlands. Said aloud, you’d be forgiven for thinking he was referring to Warsaw in Poland – but it might as well have been. In Joseph’s eyes, Walsall is a distant place, full of “grey skies, tarmac, staring into space, throwing rocks and being like, ‘Yo, imagine we’re on the beach’.” But it’s also the place where his musical aspirations first took hold: “Walsall is like a blessing, all of my endeavors are connected to that kid from that place in his bedroom,” he says.

In his early teens, Joseph fell in with nascent Soundcloud hip-hop/R&B collective OG Horse, which also counted fellow Walsall resident Jorja Smith among its ranks (“My dad and her dad actually used to play in the same band together, they put us in the same keyboard class,” he recalls). The group picked up some early traction, and even scored a meeting with Universal, which 16-year-old Joseph missed because he couldn’t get the day off school. But, as the group waned, he moved to London to carve out his own sonic universe.

Fast-forward a few years of what Joseph describes as “constant elevator pitches, non-stop work and eating instant noodles” and he’s finally arrived at the crystallisation of this dream. There’s a distinct emotion underpinning all of Joseph’s music thus far, an intense, almost dramatic melancholy that sits somewhere between Brockhampton-esque hip-hop and neon-lit R&B, but Forever Ends Someday turns this up to 11. It’s a deeply personal reckoning with the weight of his dreams, with production that soundtracks both the height of the night and the lonely drive home.

Hearing how seriously he took worldbuilding on this project, Joseph’s thoughts on Marty Supreme finally clicked. “When I watched that film, I was like, ‘Yo, I feel this energy’,” he says, laughing. “I’m a firm believer in the intangible becoming tangible with consistency. At first I was just talking crazy but, you do that for long enough, people start believing. We’re definitely not there yet, this is just the beginning, but I’m here for the war.”

Below, singer, rapper, producer, video director and all-round big dreamer Wesley Joseph gives Dazed the first look inside his long-awaited debut album.

The project opens with what almost sounds like a therapy session. Is that you talking to yourself?

Wesley Joseph: I think so. The way I navigate through life is I exist as an eight-year-old version of myself, present-tense version of myself and an 80-year-old version of myself at all times. If I were to have an ego, I would think of my younger self: would that kid like me? My present-tense version is like when I need to react right now to realities; I need to be truthful to myself right now. The 80-year-old version of myself is when I’m scared – like my first show.

There was a period of time when I didn’t even want to release music, because the concept of having to do a show in front of people alone on the stage was so terrifying to me. The only way I could go on stage was by seeing myself as an 80-year-old man and being like, ‘Don’t be a bitch, bro. You’re gonna make me very happy if you do this.’ That day I was like, ‘Oh, I love this shit!’ Every time I have to lean into my 80-year-old self it’s amazing because I know I’m about to, XP-up. I’m about to have a new life-armour, [a new thing] that I’m OK with now.

Both on the project and in person, it sounds like you don’t cut yourself any slack.

Wesley Joseph: Yeah, if I’m shooting a music video, and, like, the lighting isn’t good, I’ll be like, ‘We need to change that right now’. I’m a perfectionist, inherently, but, with age, I’m learning that perfectionism is a cloak for insecurity or anxiety. It’s this cloak that you cover your fear of success in, or your fear of failure. You just keep working on it so then you’ll never know-type-thing. When I was feeling low, I’d be like, ‘I’ll just work on this thing.’ Now, I’m at a point where it’s very fresh. When something’s finished and it’s like, what it needs to be, I’ll hand it over.

There’s a very distinct colour that underpins all of your music, where do you think that comes from?

Wesley Joseph: When we were making [lead track] ‘Distant Man’, for example, I was like, ‘I want to make a “Bohemian Rhapsody” rap ballad mixed with rock star stuff like David Bowie.’ A lot of the DNA of the project is rooted in these colours from different genres and different eras in the past. I knew all the dynamics, I just didn’t have the lyrics yet. I knew the textures, I knew the reverbs would be metallic, I knew I wanted the piano to be sharp. Like, ‘Pluto baby’, it’s like 4am in the club, but it’s also textured like it’s from the past. The album is a tapestry that took a long time to make, but they all coexist and complement each other.

What sort of spaces was the project made in?

Wesley Joseph: Huge portions of it were made without any lyrics, but the top lines were there. So, melodically, it was written in Hastings, LA, Switzerland – I went to the top of the mountain for a week with Mikey and Harvey – and my studio in London. Then, for the lyrics, I had to go back home for a bit and went to all the old places I used to go in Walsall. I just spent hours sitting in parks or walking the streets, smoking cigarettes, writing, hands cold as fuck, on my phone. There were all these beautiful 360 moments, like [‘July feat. Jorja Smith’] we recorded in Jorja’s new house. It was like, ‘We really dreamt this shit.’

Perfectionism is a cloak for insecurity or anxiety. It’s this cloak that you cover your fear of success in, or your fear of failure

What were those early OG Horse moments like?

Wesley Joseph: I had a few different names back then, I think I would have been from the age of, like, 13 to 18. Within the environment we grew up in, it was all just people we met who loved the same things – skating, music, producing, filmmaking. Eventually, one of the songs me and my boy made started getting some traction. Mark Ronson fucked with it and got in touch, it got played on the radio in France, and then, funnily enough, a footballer got in touch. He DM’d us saying he fucked with OG Horse. There was a meeting with Universal and everyone who had left school went, but I was 16 and couldn’t go. Apparently, it was fucking hilarious.

What happened?

Wesley Joseph: I wasn’t there, but from what I recall, it was just them smelling of loud [weed], one of us had a skateboard knocking shit over. Bare man in the room not taking it seriously. One of our dads was there to mediate, but he wasn’t really our manager. That was a beautiful time. We all learned how to record together. It was like, if you can impress the mandem, nothing else really matters. If you can impress these people who are brutally honest and culturally reflect exactly what you are, then nothing else matters. I’ve kept that with me.

Given all the wide-ranging influences the project draws on, I wanted to ask – if an alien came to Earth, what three albums would you show them?

Wesley Joseph: I know I’m going to change my answer in like two hours, but [My Beautiful] Dark Twisted Fantasy – that’s the best rap album ever without being like a social commentary. Frank Ocean Blonde… and Michael Jackson Off the Wall.

“Peace of Mind feat. Danny Brown” is out now.