Nubiyan Twist - Chasing Shadows

In Seascraper by Benjamin Wood, the protagonist, Thomas Flett, is a shrimp fisherman making a meagre living on the shores of Longferry, a fictional town in the north of England. His slow, deliberate life is punctuated by moments of quiet fantasy, visions of transcending the narrow limits of his circumstances and performing with his guitar at the local folk club. Wood’s novel inhabits the space that exists between dreams and reality, capturing a friction between artistic aspirations and the economic ties that bind.

It is a tension that has become increasingly familiar. As the cost of living crisis continues to bite, the possibility of sustaining a life in the arts is becoming ever more remote, not only for those just starting out, but for more established artists too.

“I’d be lying if I said there hadn’t been times when I’d wanted to pack it all in,” Tom Excell tells me, as we sit down to discuss Chasing Shadows, the new album from Nubiyan Twist. “There’ve been multiple times where I’ve just thought this is not worth the headache or the stress. Not because of any of the people I work with, but just the economics of it. Trying to keep afloat, trying to feed my family. It’s so tough.”

It’s a surprising admission from someone seemingly at the apex of their career, and one that shatters any romantic ideas that so often surround the layman’s understanding of a life in the arts. For all their acclaim, Nubiyan Twist are not immune to the pressures that have come to define the modern music industry.

It would not be hyperbolic to describe them as one of the most compelling and innovative acts in UK jazz today. With an expansive roster of collaborators, the band move effortlessly through a kaleidoscopic range of sounds. Soul, funk, jazz, hip-hop, reggae, Indian classical, gnawa, soukous and electronic dance music all punctuate their work, folded into an oeuvre that now spans five studio albums. On Chasing Shadows, they enlist the likes of Bootie Brown, Fatoumata Diawara and Patrice Rushen, crafting what may well be their most cohesive and ambitious project to date.

On “Mlonje: Voices Joined,” featuring the Zawose Queens, the band distil their entire ethos into a single track. Drawing on Wagogo musical traditions, they build a richly layered piece that unfolds with the looseness of a live jam. Melodic vocals, chugging basslines and stabs of synths weave in and out of one another, resulting in something that feels both intricate and deeply infectious.

Moments like this are truly transcendent and get to the heart of what the band have always been about. At a time when cultural divisions in the UK are often framed in terms of tension and incompatibility, Nubiyan Twist offer a refreshing counterpoint, a vision of cultural exchange at its most fluid and electric, unbounded by any outdated and rigid ideas of genre.

In the lead-up to the album’s release however, Excell found himself grappling with a different kind of challenge, the growing presence of artificial intelligence and its incursion into the creative industries. “I decided quite early on with this record that it was going to have a bit of a statement against the AI movement,” he explains. “I wanted to really celebrate the human nature of what we do.”

For a band like Nubiyan Twist, that philosophy hardly needs restating. Their music has always been rooted in collaboration, exchange and the unpredictable energy of live performance. Where AI might excel at aggregation or the recontextualisation of existing ideas, bands like Nubiyan Twist operate at the cutting edge of the vanguard, creating records that feel alive and new.

Despite its framing, Chasing Shadows’ politics are even wider-reaching than any press material might initially suggest. Its statements are seldom explicit or blatant. Instead, they are embedded in the act of creation, in a commitment to bringing together disparate voices, traditions and ideas, and allowing them to coexist, even as the conditions required to sustain that collaboration become increasingly precarious.

Later this week, Nubiyan Twist head out on the road for the UK leg of their tour. The logistics of mobilising nine musicians across the country are, by Excell’s own admission, considerable. “It is really tough,” he says. “I’m very blessed to have an amazing team to help make it function, but there are still huge sacrifices.” Chief among them is the question of who actually makes the trip. “We can’t always have the whole band, sometimes it has to be seven of us. That’s a painful decision to make, but something we’ve had to learn to accept.”

There is a sad irony in the fact that a record celebrating the irreducible power of a human ensemble playing together is one its leader cannot always fully realise on stage. But that gap between the ideal and the possible is something Excell has been navigating since day one.

“I don’t think starting out now we’d be able to make it work in the same way,” he says, a damning indictment of the state of the UK music industry. “It’d probably be a three-piece with a backing track or something.”

Despite the economic pressures, Excell and his bandmates continue because of a sense that their music has become something bigger than any one of them. It’s hard to disagree. The energy of a Nubiyan Twist show is difficult to comprehend.  During the pandemic, the UK government’s suggestion that artists should retrain felt, to many, like a profound act of cultural self-harm, an underestimation not just of the value of art, but of the entire ecosystem that sustains it. The UK music industry contributed a record £8 billion in gross value added to the economy in 2024, but its true value is much harder to quantify. “We have a lot of beautiful conversations with audiences after shows,” Excell says, “about how the music connects with people, spending the last moments with a family member who was passing, listening and dancing to our music. This is such an important therapy.”

Part of what gives that therapy its weight is what it costs to provide it. Becoming a parent deepened Excell’s sense of purpose, sharpening the urgency behind what they make and why. “Since being a parent there’s definitely a deeper purpose in terms of the political messaging,” he says. “Trying to create some positivity for the future.” 

Becoming a parent reframes everything, the cutthroat economics, the rotating lineup, the difficult decisions made in service of keeping something alive that the world seems increasingly determined to undermine. Nubiyan Twist has become a talisman for the moment. They aren’t just a band trying to survive, they are a group of people trying to leave behind something worth inheriting. Something human.

The new record’s title speaks to exactly that, a desire to chase the shadows of ancestors who existed before smartphones, before social media, before the slow colonisation of everyday life by screens. “We are the last generation that existed before you had a smartphone from the age of seven,” he says. “That is part of my mission, to try and preserve some of the lessons from our ancestors about how important life is without all this stuff.”

There is something of Thomas Flett in their intention, the same stubborn, inextinguishable compulsion to make something in spite of the circumstances. But Flett’s dream is not just to play, it is to play in a room, with people, at the local folk club, to share something fleeting and intimate with those around him.

That, ultimately, is what bands like Nubiyan Twist are fighting to preserve. Not just the ability to make music, but the conditions that allow it to be experienced together, live and communal. 

This week, the band head out on tour. Rooms will be filled with fans. The lineup may shift. The finances might not stack up. But for a few hours each night, in cities across the country, people will gather together. Strangers, friends and family, all sharing in something that cannot be automated, streamed or scaled.

Chasing Shadows by Nubiyan Twist is out now.