Collection: Kokoroko

Kokoroko formed in 2014 when Sheila Maurice-Grey and Onome Edgeworth met on an arts trip to Kenya and came home to London with a shared idea: to connect young people in the African diaspora with the Afrobeat and highlife traditions that Fela Kuti, Tony Allen and Ebo Taylor had built. Their breakthrough came when Gilles Peterson put "Abusey Junction," a seven-minute guitar-rooted ballad, as the closing track on the "We Out Here" Brownswood compilation in 2018, and it accumulated tens of millions of streams within weeks of the video going online. The self-titled EP that followed confirmed the range. Their debut full-length "Could We Be More" (Brownswood, 2022) expanded the palette toward funk, gospel and Caribbean sounds while keeping the West African highlife rhythm structures at the centre. "Tuff Times Never Last" (Brownswood, 2025), produced by Miles Clinton James, moved further toward neo-soul, 1980s British R&B and lovers rock, featuring guest vocalists including Azekel and Demae, and earned the band comparisons to Donald Byrd's mid-1970s Blue Note recordings for the lightness of its jazz-funk touch. They are based in London and remain active.