Fold – We’re the Ones

Our second album We’re the Ones is dedicated to those who care about others

Released four years after our self-titled debut LP, We’re the Ones is about fostering empowerment, understanding, unity and equality among listeners. It is also intended as an honest reflection of our troubled times and as a challenge to mainstream narratives that continue to damage our societies.

The album binds together a diverse group of voices across time & space tackling difficult issues. These voices come in the form of MCs, poets, singers and historical speakers. We’ve let all of our musical influences, and theirs, freely commingle. The real story of this record is its nebula of contributors.

The title track is our first collaboration with London-based MC & spoken word activist Potent Whisper. The subject matter, lyrics, title and video concept (see the video link below) were all his, we just provided the music. UK poet Mr Gee brought us his celebrated work Living on a Knife’s Edge, a painfully relevant unpicking of knife crime. With Stand Up we introduce talented young Leeds poet Natalie Davies, reciting her own work & singing backing vocals (having never recorded in the studio before). Two more firsts are collaborations with radical MC / beatboxing champion MotorMouF from Nottingham on Stronger Than the Evils, as well as Komla MC—a Ghanaian expat here in the north of England—confronting the perils of addiction on Bad Thing backed by the magnificent singing of Daisy Martey of Noonday Underground, Morcheeba et al.

Alongside the contemporary voices are a mixture of speech & singing samples from Malcolm X, Bessie Jones, Dorothy Dandridge, James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Walker, Marge Piercy, bell hooks, Sweet Honey in the Rock and Margaret Walker. The dead often dance with the living on this record and their thoughts are hauntingly aligned despite the intervening decades.

We’ve also had the great fortune of recruiting some of Leeds’ finest musicians including rising star Emma Johnson with her stellar horn arrangements and superb saxmanship throughout; the much loved Kieran O’Malley turning a single violin into an entire string section; cameos from accomplished composer Jake Mehew on Stand Up and Teacher and an appearance from expat scratch DJ Mista Ed on We’re the Ones.

The cover photo was taken by the great Ansel Adams at Manzanar, “most widely known as the site of one of ten American concentration camps where over 110,000 Japanese Americans were incarcerated during World War II.”

We want to thank everyone who contributed to this record; the credits are as extensive as our gratitude. The dedication on the album is to ‘those who care about others.’ If you’re listening and / or reading this, know that you are counted among those people and we thank you most of all for just that.