Written By | Entertainment Desk
Here Because of Hope," released Friday, is 17 tracks in three movements tracing Black music from West Africa to the Caribbean to a London rehearsal room
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LONDON
Three years ago, a five-piece band from north London walked onto a stage at the Eventim Apollo in Hammersmith and did something that had not happened in the Mercury Prize's 31-year history. Ezra Collective won it. A jazz group. Not a jazz-adjacent pop act, not a crossover experiment — a horn-and-drums instrumental band, with a bandleader who plays the drums and talks like a youth worker, taking the biggest album prize in British music for "Where I'm Meant To Be."
What has happened since has been stranger than the win. In March 2025 they became the first jazz band to take Group of the Year at the Brit Awards, and the first jazz group to perform at the ceremony in its 45-year history — a set they shared with Jorja Smith and thirty young musicians from the south London collective Kinetika Bloco. They sold out Wembley Arena, which no jazz act had done. They did all of this without softening the music into something more obviously commercial.
"Here Because of Hope," released on 11 September, is what a band does when it has run out of ceilings to break and has to decide what it actually wants to say.
A record in three movements
The album runs to seventeen tracks and is structured, deliberately, as three movements — spiritual and geographical at once. It traces the passage of Black music across continents and decades: the rhythms of West Africa, the sound systems and dancehalls of the Caribbean, and finally the streets, buses and basements of London where the members of the band grew up.
That is an enormous conceptual load for an instrumental band to carry, and it would collapse if the music did not move. It moves. The record slips between the heavy-footed pull of reggae and the sprint of soca, sometimes inside a single track. Roughly two-thirds of it is horn-led and wordless. The rest brings in voices as unalike as the British rapper Pa Salieu and the Jamaican reggae singer Lila Iké, and threads spoken poetry read by the actor Letitia Wright between the movements.
Critics have largely met it as the group's most ambitious and most personal work — not a reinvention, but a container finally big enough for what they were already doing.
Joy as an argument
There is a temptation, with a band this generous on stage, to treat the joy as decoration. It is not. Femi Koleoso, the drummer and bandleader, has spent the better part of a decade making the case that celebration is a serious artistic position — that a room full of people dancing to a horn section is not a lighter thing than a room full of people sitting still.
The title makes the case explicitly. Hope, in this framing, is not optimism about outcomes. It is the thing that survived the crossing. An album that follows Black music from Africa to the Caribbean to Britain is necessarily also an album about displacement, and the choice to render that history as a dance record rather than a lament is the argument.
It is also why the reggae and soca passages matter structurally rather than decoratively. Those forms carry their own histories of making festival music out of hard circumstances. Ezra Collective are not borrowing a texture; they are joining a lineage and saying so.
Where the band came from
Part of what makes the ascent legible is that none of it was accidental. Ezra Collective came out of London's youth jazz infrastructure — the workshops, the free Saturday sessions, the mentoring programmes that have quietly produced most of the current generation of British jazz musicians. Koleoso has returned to that point relentlessly from the Mercury and Brit stages alike, naming the youth clubs and music services that made the band possible and pointing out how many have closed.
That Brits performance with Kinetika Bloco was the thesis staged in public: thirty teenagers on a national broadcast, inside an awards show that had never made room for jazz in forty-five years. "If someone is at the BRITs because we inspired them," Koleoso told NME around that win, "then we last forever."
A crowded Friday
"Here Because of Hope" landed on one of the busiest release days of the British autumn. The same New Music Friday brought new albums from Bloc Party, Kings of Leon, Slipknot, David Guetta, John Legend, Paloma Faith and The Proclaimers — a schedule stacked with acts who sell considerably more records than a jazz quintet.
Ezra Collective's previous album, 2024's "Dance, No One's Watching," reached the UK Top 10, so the commercial question is no longer whether a jazz record can chart. It is whether a seventeen-track concept album about the Black Atlantic can do it against a wall of arena rock and dance-pop.
What it means for listeners
If you have never knowingly listened to a jazz album, this is an unusually low-friction place to start, and not because it has been diluted. The rhythmic centre is Afrobeat, reggae and soca rather than bebop, which means the entry point is your feet rather than your theory.
If you already follow British jazz, the interest is in scale: whether the intimacy that made this band — five friends playing in a room — survives being stretched across three movements, multiple continents and an hour of music. Early reviews suggest it does, which is the surprising part.
The bigger frame
British jazz has been described as "having a moment" for roughly eight years now, which is long enough that the phrase should probably be retired. What Ezra Collective have demonstrated is more durable than a moment: that an instrumental band with no obvious radio format can win the country's most prestigious album prize, headline an arena, and then make the most conceptually demanding record of its career — and treat all three as the same project.
The band's live schedule is where the album will be tested properly, because it always is with this group. But as a document of what happens when a band stops trying to prove it belongs and starts deciding what it wants to be about, it is already the most interesting British release of the month.
