Promise — A long road, finally ready to share

I’ve been working on this album for more than four years, and on 29 December 2025, it finally comes out. It’s a collaborative project between myself and Napoleon Da Legend, and it’s called Promise.

The title feels fitting. Not in a grand, dramatic way, more in the sense of something you quietly carry with you for a long time, even when circumstances keep shifting. That’s what this record has been for me.

How it started, and how it nearly stopped

When we first began the album, it was just the two of us, then last year the album was signed to an indie label. There was momentum, structure, the sense that things were moving in the “right” direction. Then, as these things sometimes go, the support disappeared. Suddenly the project I thought had a home didn’t anymore.

There was a big moment where everything fell apart in an instant, and the realisation of the situation and knock on affect was more gradual than that...we’d have to rethink everything. Part of me wondered whether to leave it behind. Instead, I kept coming back to it, and Napoleon's belief in the album, and his openness to different approaches continued the push. I believed in the music, and in what Napoleon and I had built together, even when the path got messy.

Working with Dan Lish on the artwork was a dream come true. Dan is one of my favourite artists, and having now worked with both him and Nearski I'm feeling so lucky to have my creative ideas be fully visualised. Having supported Dan's art whilst at Wordplay Magazine, bought his pieces, books, and hosted hid Bristol book launch, alongside interviewing him for Diggin' The Crates, this was a special, and humbling moment.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYh3a6AmGCE

What the album became...

Because the process took so long, the album naturally changed with it. The themes deepened. The tone matured. My own perspective shifted along the way, alongside Napoleon evolving and shifting as an artist.

Promise is shaped by all of that time, not polished or engineered to sound like something “current”, but honest in a way that only comes from sitting with something for years. Napoleon’s writing brings clarity to the more tangled parts of the journey, and the production became a space to process the frustration, the hope, and the small wins that kept the project alive.

It’s not an album about being defeated by the industry. It’s about working within it, around it, and sometimes despite it.

The reason for sharing this story

I’m not telling the behind-the-scenes stuff for drama. It’s just the reality: things don’t always move cleanly, even when the work is good. A lot of artists experience this, projects paused, reshaped, delayed, or dropped altogether, and most of the time, the audience never hears how or why.

For me, finishing Promise became about seeing something through because it mattered creatively, not because it was part of a perfect rollout or fitted neatly into an industry timeline. That probably explains the tone of the album more than anything else.

Looking ahead

So, on 29 December 2025, the album will be out in the world. I’m proud of it, not because the journey was difficult, but because we stayed with it long enough for it to become what it needed to be.

I’ll share more over the next few weeks, including the videos, the single, and some of the process behind the tracks via Instagram. For now, I just wanted to give some context, and to say thank you to anyone who’s followed the slow, slightly winding path of this release.

The album is available to pre-save now via Spotify, and is available to pre-order digitally on Bandcamp HERE.

I'm really looking forward to getting this album out in the world, and thank you to everyone has supported this process, and helped us to continue on with this journey.