ALBUM REVIEWS
For over two decades, Tottenham’s revered wordsmith Wretch 32 has evolved before our eyes, from a raw talent to a cornerstone of UK rap, taking up space beyond his own records. In the six years since his last album ‘Upon Reflection’, he’s been a creative director for 0207 Def Jam, penned a poem for Stormzy’s 2022 cinematic comeback ‘Mel Made Me Do It’, and written his first book, Rapthology: Lessons in Life and Lyrics. Now he’s back behind the mic, imparting his wisdom in his sixth album, ‘Home?’, his most philosophical release yet.
Despite the Windrush generation’s crucial role in shaping British culture, their descendants still grapple with belonging. As a second-gen British-Jamaican, Wretch seeks to ease that restlessness with a message of healing and growth, promising back in October that ‘Home?’ is for those “who need soul food and something to fulfil them” – but this nourishment is for all of those simply wondering where their home is.
On the fiery ‘Seven Seater’, the Tottenham star makes it known that he’s not “competing with numbers,” just delivering his divine message on heritage and selfhood – quickly expanding to the lived tension between Blackness and belonging. That journey quickly deepens on the indulgent ‘Like Home’ with Nigeria’s Temi where Wretch briefly honours his ancestral home of Africa, framed by Bob Marley’s words: “Every Black man in the West is what he want to be when he goes to Africa.”
He continues his search for belonging with ‘Nesta Marley’. A track swelling with emotional clarity, Wretch and Skip Marley offer a powerful moment of diasporic healing as the former yearns for a deeper connection to his motherland. The intellectual polymath “prays for better days, where we all can live as one” – a call for unity that extends beyond the diaspora to all of humanity. He echoes this sentiment by interpolating the melody of Dido’s ‘Thank You’ on the refrain, reflecting his desire for inner peace and acceptance: “Roots and culture in my system, di I-dem big and strong / People fighting out my window, cyant they see da sun?” As the track closes, the vinyl crackles like a burning chalice, with Wretch’s prophetic, parabolic spoken words soaring higher than I-and-I in this sonic reasoning session.
‘Bridge Is Burning’ with Chronixx mourns the rupture migration leaves behind as adopted cultures eclipse inherited values, the link to the motherland slowly smouldering. That’s why it flows so powerfully into ‘Me & Mine’ – a sunlit, island-fused anthem with WSTRN that doesn’t just bounce for vibes’ sake: it symbolises what we built from the ashes. Haile’s hook fused Wretch’s raw croon with Akelle’s slick lines and Louis Rei’s yard-man style, nostalgically interpolating Sanchez’s reggae classic ‘Frenzy’. This isn’t escapism – it’s a reclaimed sound where the spirit of back home echoes loud.
As ‘Home?’ unfolds, Wretch brings in Black British voices – Little Simz, Benjamin AD, Angel, Skrapz, Tiggs Da Author and more – to help explore love, survival and legacy across Britain’s diaspora. ‘Seven Seater’ sees Wretch reunite with The Movement brethren Mercston and Ghetts to celebrate grime’s Black British roots and the brotherhood that has been central to the genre and Black Britons’ survival. Kano dissects Black Britishness on ‘Home Sweet Home’, using his Jamaican heritage and football hooliganism to expose society’s flippancy between race and nationality, forcing Black people to juggle their identities.
That unsettled spirit reverberates on ‘Windrush’ with Cashh – a rapper deported by the UK Home Office in 2014 who fought for five years to return – exposing generational betrayal. But the sweet-yet-short interlude ‘Home Is Where The Heart Is’ is where Wretch succinctly captures the tension best: “They call me all of the names, under the sun, still I rise, morning come / Home is where the heart is, why do you stay where you are?”
In the end, Wretch’s search for belonging is emotive and heart-wrenching for those who truly understand what it is to be forever torn between worlds. Yet, within that loss, he hosts a homecoming of sorts – an invitation for Black Britons to mourn, heal, and ultimately celebrate what they and their forebears have built despite everything. When Wretch said ‘Home?’ would be “soul food”, he wasn’t kidding. It goes beyond that, becoming a testament to the strength of roots that refuse to wither and a promise that – no matter where you are in the world – you can always find a piece of home in this record.
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More than most bands that began in the backseat of the family car, Car Seat Headrest seem well-suited for a high-concept rock opera. From the band’s earliest days, when the project was just Will Toledo recording alone in Virginia, songs were never just as simple as singer and subject—his 2011 album Twin Fantasy was a romantic epic sheepishly masquerading as a ramshackle emo record. His 2020 record Making a Door Less Open was essentially a treatise on fame itself, and culminated in Toledo adopting the persona “Trait,” a gas-masked, bunny-eared protagonist previously introduced in a Car Seat Headrest side project called 1 Trait Danger. When Car Seat Headrest began teasing their new record, The Scholars, via an alternate reality game-style website, it felt like an appropriately elaborate rollout for a band who’s rarely taken reality at face value.
And yet, Toledo was hesitant to dive head-on into the full-scale world-building of a rock opera. To hear him tell it, he seemed afraid that he might stumble into one of the genre’s many pitfalls. “You pull something off of The Wall—it’s not necessarily going to be banging on its own. It needs that context,” he told the podcast How Long Gone. “I like when you can pull a song out and have that individual piece.” It’s a brutal assessment of Pink Floyd, though it comes from a deep respect (the original version of Twin Fantasy’s “High to Death” interpolated “Jugband Blues,” after all).
On The Scholars, every song aims to be an “Another Brick in the Wall Pt. 2”—nine self-contained epics that, Toledo hopes, will sum to a greater whole. But overburdened by a confusing plot, with no room for a listener to digest the bevvy of settings and characters he’s just introduced, The Scholars is mired in and muddied by the madcap impulses of its creator, drowning out what would otherwise be some of the band’s most inspired, experimental compositions to date. The Scholars is a rock opera for the playlist era; it wants to contain both a richly textured narrative—with all the character development, internal motivations, and rising and falling action required therein—and also nine songs that can stand alone, plucked out of context and jutted up against whatever other songs happen to land on Spotify’s autoplay.
So, the plot: The Scholars takes us to the imaginary Parnassus University, where we meet a cast of students who are all on parallel searches for meaning: our narrator, the Chanticleer; Beolco, a playwright who’s paranoid his best ideas are behind him: “A thousand ideas piled up in the tomb,” he says on “CCF (I’m Gonna Stay With You)”; Devereaux, the “son of a backwaters religious conservative” who hopes to find higher meaning on the libertine lawns of the American university (“Devereaux”); and Rosa, a medical student who can revive the dead (“Gethsemane”). There is also, of course, a local community based on dressing in furs and feathers (“Lady Gay Approximately”), which I’ll let the Redditors decipher.
These plot points matter as much as you care to listen closely: There are pivotal moments in the form of a deadly plant and clown raid that I somehow missed in the first listen, too distracted by the stylistic changeups and clouded metaphors crammed into every song. Most of the key narrative drivers are buried in liner notes on the lyric sheet but aren't represented anywhere in the music. Certain songs carry enough momentum to warrant repeat listens out of the album context: “The Catastrophe (Good Luck With That, Man)” takes the familiar punk-leaning pop shape that has defined Car Seat Headrest, the chiming strums of an acoustic guitar giving way to drum fills, reverb, and Toledo’s fuzzy, clipped vocals. The same goes for “True/False Lover,” which careens from guitar solo to verse with the practiced ease of someone who’s spent the past 15 years writing hooks.
But the preceding three songs, which range from 10 minutes on the short end to 18 at the longest, test the premise of the album and the patience of the listener. “Gethsemane” begins quietly with just a synth and Toledo’s voice; “Reality” brings to mind Air’s Moon Safari; “Planet Desperation” is the most forthrightly self-serious, with somber piano and the slow beat of a kick drum. Yet they all manage to wind up in about the same place at their halfway points—stuttering prog interludes, towering electric guitar solos, belted refrains that seem to come out of nowhere and fade just as quickly. Storylines are lost in the mayhem: I feel like I’m catching the plot but then as soon as guitarist Ethan Ives, as Parnassus’ Liberal Arts school dean Hyacinth, sings “I would go out/But there’s a world war,” I feel totally lost again. It’s almost impressive how much these disparate modes seem to converge on a central sound, and how much that sound boils down to: play loud, play fast, repeat. There’s a reason, it seems, that The Wall includes comparatively quieter tracks like “Empty Spaces” or “One of My Turns”—if every song needs to stand alone, they each require some sort of internal climax, a summit that feels exhausting to climb song after song.
Still, The Scholars is filled with compelling experimentation and glimpses of greater potential. Toledo’s voice sounds stronger than ever here, warmly recorded in analog, and songs like “Devereaux,” which lean into power pop influences like the Cars and Cheap Trick, feel like the most successful attempt to combine narrative with concise songcraft. “CCF,” one of the album’s standout songs, sounds like a potential future path for Car Seat Headrest—one that introduces elements of jazz and funk to his fundamentally scrappy sound without overpowering it with heavy-handed signifiers and seemingly endless trips up and down the neck of his guitar. Car Seat Headrest is a band almost predestined for the kind of high-stakes storytelling a rock opera requires—if only Toledo could let his own ideas breathe.
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