The song began in a crowd. Playing Wembley Arena in 2024, Ezra Collective bandleader Femi Koleoso looked out and saw Pa Salieu dancing with his friends. “I had the very thought we need to make a song together for this kind of setting,” he told NME. That song is “Only Love”, and it sits at the heart of Here Because of Hope, the fourth Ezra Collective album, released on 11 September through Partisan Records.
What Koleoso did next was an instrument decision rather than a booking. He spent time studying West African and Gambian music, he told NME, and let it shape the bassline and the drumbeat of the track. The rhythm section, in other words, went looking for the tradition the rapper carries, so that the groove would already speak his language when he arrived.
How Only Love Was Built
“Only Love” is the first time the band and Pa Salieu have recorded together. NME describes it as built around West African-inspired grooves, with horns and deeply personal lyrics from the rapper, finding beauty in resilience, joy and survival. Koleoso said the band had long admired Pa Salieu, both for his storytelling and for the way he weaves his Gambian heritage into a distinctly UK sound.
The session itself was simple. The band met him in Wood Green in north London, and he arrived with lyrics written during a very hard period in his life. Koleoso described those lyrics as full of pain and also of beauty, joy and love, and said the aim was to find the place between the two. The finished track runs three minutes and 22 seconds, according to the album’s Bandcamp listing.
That search for the space between pain and joy turns out to be the idea behind the whole record.
An Album in Three Movements
Here Because of Hope is conceived in three spiritual and geographical movements, according to the release notes from the band’s publicists. It traces the movement of Black people, music and culture from West Africa, across the Caribbean and home to the streets of London, and it asks why so much Black music born out of profound pain sounds so joyful. The answer the band give is hope: the belief, carried across generations and oceans, that something better is possible.
The structure is audible in the running order. The Bandcamp listing shows 17 tracks, with three short spoken pieces read by the actor Letitia Wright, Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3, placed at tracks one, seven and 13, so the record divides into three sections framed by her voice. The press notes say the first movement draws on Afrobeat and the traditions of the continent, the second on reggae, dub and salsa, and the third on UK jazz, broken beat, funky house and grime.
The guests are spread across that map. Pa Salieu is on “Only Love”, Lila Iké on “Well Organised”, Leona Lewis on “All I Need” and Libianca on “Most High”, the closing track. The band described the whole record to NME as a journey from pain to joy with hope as the connecting word, and said they hoped it would make people dance and make people cry.
What the Running Order Shows
Between Wright’s three readings, which last 44, 35 and 47 seconds, the songs fall into groups of five, five and four. The first group runs “Blow Your Trumpet”, “Sweet Echo”, “Don’t Worry”, “Only Love” and “Someday”, which at five minutes and 47 seconds is the longest piece on the record. The second runs “Birdie Sings”, “The Last Stand”, “Well Organised”, “El Corazón” and “Bunny on the Rise”. The third closes with “All I Need”, “Jubilee Feeling”, “Black Flag” and “Most High”.
“Jubilee Feeling” was released as a single in August, ahead of the album, and Bandcamp also lists a deluxe edition of Here Because of Hope released in September. Placing the spoken pieces as short thresholds rather than long interludes keeps the album moving like a set, with the performances doing most of the storytelling.
Salsa, Clave and the Caribbean Turn
The most direct change of instrumentation comes in the second movement. “El Corazón”, the album’s release-day focus track, brings salsa into the band’s sound, driven by conga patterns, bursts of brass and the pull of the clave, according to the release notes. It widens the Caribbean section beyond reggae and dub to the traditions of the Latin Caribbean.
Bassist TJ Koleoso said that making room for salsa mattered to the band because, in his view, the UK does not understand the style well, and they wanted to show it could be a serious piece of music rather than a novelty. For a quintet built on drums, bass, keys, saxophone and trumpet, taking on the clave means organising every part around a single rhythmic pattern, which is a different way of playing together from the grooves they are best known for.
Five Musicians From the Same Youth Clubs
The quintet is Femi Koleoso on drums, TJ Koleoso on bass, Joe Armon-Jones on keys, James Mollison on saxophone and Ife Ogunjobi on trumpet. They came together through London’s youth music community, with roots in the free music education programme Tomorrow’s Warriors, and the release notes list what followed: the Mercury Prize, the BRIT Awards, UK top 10 albums and a sold-out Wembley Arena. Jazz is thin on this year’s Mercury list: the only jazz album on the 2026 shortlist is A Great Day In Newcastle by Knats.
Here Because of Hope follows 2024’s Dance, No One’s Watching, and the band told NME that their first records felt like Ezra Collective as children, while this one feels like Ezra Collective as adults. Rolling Stone UK put them on its cover, calling them one of Britain’s biggest bands and the album their most ambitious chapter yet, and Elton John has called them the best live band in Britain, the release notes say. Earlier this year the band also issued a 10th anniversary edition of Chapter 7, according to their Bandcamp page.
The early reception quoted in the release notes follows the album’s own theme. NPR Music urged listeners to hear it in its entirety, Vulture wrote that the quintet “traverses Black diasporic sound traditions”, and FLOOD called it “a heartfelt marvel”. Pitchfork had already named it among its most anticipated albums of the summer, and The Guardian handed Femi Koleoso its Saturday magazine culture section for an eight-page takeover built around the ideas behind the record.
Where to Hear It Live
The album is on the road through the winter. Bandcamp lists dates at The Tivoli in Brisbane on 2 October, Pica in Melbourne on 4 October and the Marina Bay Street Circuit in Singapore on 9 October, followed by a North American run in November: Bimbo’s 365 Club in San Francisco on 12 November, The Regent in Los Angeles, The Concert Hall in Toronto, Webster Hall in New York and Théâtre Beanfield in Montréal on 19 November.
Europe follows in February 2027, with Berlin, Brussels, Cologne, Amsterdam, Villeurbanne and the Zénith in Paris, before a UK and Irish run that includes three nights at The Prospect Building in Bristol, two at the 3Olympia Theatre in Dublin, the Usher Hall in Edinburgh, two nights at Aviva Studios in Manchester and four nights at the O2 Academy Brixton from 18 to 21 March.
On record, the album comes as a double LP on transparent ocean blue vinyl in a gatefold sleeve, a CD and a signed indie-shop edition on translucent white vinyl listed by Piccadilly Records. However it is heard, the shape is the same: three movements, one question, and a song that started with a rapper dancing in an arena crowd.
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