Joshua Idehen – I Know You’re Hurting, Everyone Is Hurting, Everyone Is Trying, You Have Got To Try (Heavenly) (13th Floor Album Review)
Joshua Idehen’s I Know You’re Hurting, Everyone Is Hurting, Everyone Is Trying, You Have Got To Try presents an immersive fusion of spoken word and electronic textures that explores community, endurance and emotional navigation through sound. Built on pulse and atmosphere, the record unfolds gradually, allowing its musical language to establish itself before attention turns toward the voice, its cadence, phrasing and emotional weight.
Idehen is a British Nigerian spoken word artist and writer who first gained recognition through collaborations within the UK’s jazz and electronic scene, contributing vocals and poetry to projects linked to Sons of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming. Years of performance shaped an approach that treats language as rhythmic material, integrated into musical structure rather than layered above it. This album gathers those experiences into a cohesive statement.
Working with producer Ludvig Parment, Idehen develops songs in which sounds expand, contract and return with subtle variation, creating continuity across the album’s forty seven minutes. Bass and percussion repeatedly stabilise drifting synthesisers, guiding attention between abstraction and physical grounding while gradually deepening the record’s sonic atmosphere.
The opening track, You Wanna Dance Or What?, begins with circling synth tones that accumulate slowly before a deep bass pulse arrives and anchors the music with physical clarity. The following pieces extend this approach. Drones widen, percussion gathers momentum and tonal layers shift patiently. For several tracks the record withholds Idehen’s voice entirely, allowing listeners to inhabit the sonic environment first. By the time vocals arrive in This Is The Place, the listener has already been oriented through rhythm and texture, and the spoken words enter an already formed world.
Early vocal pieces such as This Is The Place and It Always Was lean into dense tonal colouring. Organ like keys and rattling electronic textures heighten tension, and when Idehen states, “This room here is holy to me,” the album’s central idea comes into focus. The dancefloor becomes a contemporary gathering point, echoing traditions of collective expression where spoken rhythm and music intertwine, and arriving at a moment when shared spaces feel newly fragile and deliberately constructed. Idehen sits within a lineage that includes Linton Kwesi Johnson and Gil Scott-Heron, while extending the form toward the inward emotional exploration associated with contemporaries such as Kae Tempest.
Interludes open into quieter passages that evoke conversations unfolding at the edges of late night spaces. These moments reset the emotional register before Could Be Forever locks into a steadier rhythmic drive that flows into Don’t Let It Get You Down, where bright percussion, pulsing bass and layered synth patterns drive the music forward with kinetic energy. Idehen’s conversational cadence integrates seamlessly with the music, allowing lines such as “We will make it through the night” to circulate as shared affirmation carried by rhythm.
Mum Does the Washing stands at the album’s centre. Over rumbling low frequencies and tightening percussion, the lyrics trace connections between domestic routine and larger historical forces, moving outward through political and religious movements before returning to everyday experience. Idehen delivers the lines with measured insistence, each phrase landing against the tightening rhythm, locking voice and music together.
The album’s final stretch hints at resolution. Everything Everywhere All At Once layers voices and percussion into a dense sonic surge that captures the simultaneity of modern life. A softer reprise restores calm before Turn It Around introduces claps and group vocals, repeating “there’s always a way to turn it around” as the rhythm settles into a communal groove.
Friendship appears throughout the record as a recurring motif, surfacing in passing reflections that emphasise mutual support and shared experience. The closing track, What Is Redemption, returns to this idea directly. Spoken reflections echo earlier expressions of solidarity, now delivered with a quieter and more searching tone. Wavering synth lines unsettle the surface, and a rising dance pulse builds pressure before dissolving into silence. The final moments settle into unresolved quiet, leaving the album suspended in uncertainty long after the sound fades.
John Bradbury
I Know You’re Hurting, Everyone Is Hurting, Everyone Is Trying, You Have Got To Try is out Friday, March 5 via Heavenly Records
