While I don’t want to track-by-track break this down necessarily, the first three songs on the album really do set an incredible tone so let’s talk briefly about “Our Day is Now” – which straddles the line between hardcore punk and death metal, stunning instrumentals and some really fucking great vocals, while also incorporating samples from a reggae performance that I feel like I should know the origin of but I’m also not going to pretend I do.
Regardless, there is a really interesting and shockingly impactful fusion taking place here and I am fucking here for it. Even “For Sista Humphrey” closes with what I would describe as almost jazz vocals, but I also don’t know fucking anything about music so that is almost certainly wrong. It’s such a strong opening to an album that is not finished playing with fusion and genre by any stretch. Some really lovely and calm strings and piano open the album intro “Africa”, and it is ended with the vocalist saying – quite plainly – “Ay yo, it’s Zulu in this bitch, what ya’ll n***as on?” before an immediate and hard transition to the crushing instrumentals of “For Sista Humphrey”, with the next voice you hear being some absolutely brutal vocals. Especially when so many metal and hardcore and punk covers convey aggression and violence, there is a celebratory feel to this and it just really fucking works.Įven the way the album begins seems to be playing with that a little bit. It shows that no culture is just one thing, it is a complex and layered thing that deserves to be taken as a whole. A genuinely beautiful piece of art that 100% does not set the expectation for what the album is going to be, and yet somehow that only works to make me like the cover more? There is this real sense of beauty in the cover, and it allows this really interesting space for the ferocity of the music to be beautiful as well.
Turns out, as usual, I was correct in my preemptive excitement, because gang – A New Tomorrow fucking goes. Thank the fucking lord, however, that the promo for A New Tomorrow came across my desk and I knew 2023 was going to be just a little better. There is a ferocity and sincere fucking rage in that album and I was worried I might have missed the boat a little bit as these days two years between albums might mean the band has dissolved or something (which, I realize, is an absolutely bananas way to look at making art). I stumbled across Zulu quite by accident in 2022, when I heard their album My People…Hold On from 2020 and was absolutely fucking floored by it.
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