Thandi Ntuli - Inkululeko (Official Audio)
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With her third studio album, pianist, composer and vocalist Thandi Ntuli begins a journey of self-discovery that picks up where 2018’s Exiled left off. “[In 2020] I was two years into the release of the last album,” she tells Apple Music. “And I was outgrowing the place I was at when I made Exiled; it held space for difficult conversations and difficult feelings—but I didn't want to get stuck in that. I became very intentional about bringing joy back to my life, to my outlook. This album is a continuation and a response to Exiled, and it's sharing little anchors and glimpses of certain things that I felt were responsible for bringing me out of that haze.” Over eight tracks, Blk Elijah and the Children of Meroë journeys through what Ntuli frames as remembering and re-membering. “I like to think of life as cyclical, but I also think that what moves us along is looking back,” she explains. “Re-membering is putting your self together again. I think a lot of people have noticed that about the life that we had accepted as normal, pre-lockdown; there’s a reckoning that you go through when you look back.”
"Inkululeko [‘freedom’] is what lies on the other side of having the courage to dig in and reconstruct yourself and your views and your life and heal yourself. The other side of it is a sense of freedom. Inner freedom, because I'm also very cognisant of the fact that freedom is not something that's been fully realised in society. And I can't yet say that, 'Society, I'm free,' but I do think that the starting point of freedom is internal. It comes from realising, first and foremost, that you're not free, having some vision of what freedom looks and feels like, that you can now work towards actually building or manifesting externally. So it was a conclusion, but not a conclusive thing. It's not that I'm free and we're all free, but I think that what I've just gone through, the process I've just gone through, has unlocked the journey to freedom. I feel free, at least, from a certain portion of life. I feel free from certain things.” - Thandi Ntuli
Along with solely featuring her own vocals across the entirety of the project (rather than her usual slate of guest stars) the album sees Ntuli play piano and synth—and record with the same band she performs with live, for the first time: Sphelelo Mazibuko (drums), Keenan Ahrends (guitar), Ndabo Zulu (trumpet), Mthunzi Mvubu (alto saxophone and flute), Shane Cooper (bass guitar), and Nomphumelelo Nhlapo (percussion) - Apple Music
THANDI NTULI
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