Wesley Joseph – Forever Ends Someday (Secretly Canadian) (13th Floor Concert Review)
Wesley Joseph’s Forever Ends Someday is a controlled, immersive record built on shifting forms and unsettled structures.
Across the album, tempo, texture and voice move in and out of alignment, with sections stopping, restarting or dissolving rather than settling into a fixed shape. The listener is kept off balance, carried between states without being allowed to settle, and that sense of instability becomes the record’s defining strength.
Joseph is a UK artist from the Midlands who first came to prominence with Ultramarine (2021) and Glow (2023), extended releases that positioned him between R&B, hip hop and rap, with a strong electronic and ambient influence. Those records introduced a more discontinuous approach to writing and structure, but often felt exploratory. Here, that approach is more focused, with its elements working in clearer alignment.
From the opening Distant Man, the album sets out its method. Over four minutes, it moves through echoing vocals, slow tonal passages and heavier, more forceful sections before stopping and resetting. Synthesised textures rise and recede, while piano figures and sustained tones create a sense of suspended motion. Rather than building toward resolution, the track cycles through changes in pace and density, establishing a disorienting pattern that carries through the record.
That pattern runs through White Tee, where clipped vocal lines sit against dark, rumbling low-end before dropping into overlapping voices and snatches of conversation, and Quicksand, which repeatedly restarts, shifting between slower passages and more direct, rap-led sections without settling into a single mode. Even If Time Could Talk, one of the more accessible tracks, moves between sung passages, spoken delivery and rap, with a recurring bass figure pulling it back into rhythm.
Across the record, arpeggiated guitar and piano lines thread through the arrangements, while synthesisers expand and contract around them. Songs are shaped through contrast and interruption rather than development, with structure defined by transition rather than progression.
This reflects Joseph’s background as a filmmaker. The songs operate as sequences of scenes, with shifts in perspective resembling changes in camera position, and ideas cut short or repeated in ways that feel closer to editing than composition. That approach extends into his visuals: the video for If Time Could Talk intercuts nightclub interiors, street scenes and performance footage, with Joseph moving through spaces that feel disconnected from one another. Time is shown looping and slipping rather than progressing, reinforcing the sense of time as something continuous, but constructed rather than linear.
At times, this connection is made explicit. A line such as “shining like I’m Kubrick” invokes Stanley Kubrick as a way of framing the tension between surface control and underlying instability that runs through the album. Elsewhere, the structure itself carries that cinematic quality, with tracks such as Seasick and Blinded shifting between sharply contrasted sections that feel more like juxtaposed scenes than parts of a single arc. When strings enter, they are used sparingly, with violin lines implying drama without resolving the underlying instability.
Lyrically, Joseph circles themes of time, memory and internal pressure. At its best, the writing sharpens into clear images. In If Time Could Talk: “If time could talk, it would say nothing but ‘I told you so’”, alongside lines such as “I wipe the salt from your eyes, because the memory so sweet”, introduces a stronger sense of physical and emotional stakes. On Peace of Mind the line “I’m already close to the edge” recalls Grandmaster Flash’s The Message, shifting its focus from social pressure to something more internal. Elsewhere, the phrasing is less specific, relying on tone and delivery rather than precise imagery.
The collaborators reinforce these shifts in tone and structure. Nicolas Jaar shapes the more spacious, open-ended passages of the record, using synth layers and space as structural elements, while Danny Brown brings sharper definition, his verse on Peace of Mind cutting cleanly through the surrounding fluidity. Jorja Smith provides grounding on July, her vocal adding warmth and clarity. Together, they underline the album’s unsettled movement between looseness and control.
The final run of tracks leans further into reduction and repetition. Manuka strips the music back to voice and silence, Mind Games condenses the album’s ideas into a 53-second loop of overlapping voices, and Seasick returns to a shifting form before 100 Miles settles into a slower, contained groove that suggests movement without arrival.
There is no resolution. Tracks break apart or fall away rather than building toward a conclusion, and the album ends in the same restless state it maintains throughout. That consistency and attention to detail give Forever Ends Someday its coherence and mark it as a compelling and fully realised record, one that sustains its central idea with control, even as it resists settling into any single, stable form.
John Bradbury
Forever Ends Someday is out April 10th via Secretly Canadian
