Take Me Home finds Freshlyground listening forward

There is something quietly radical happening in South Africa’s listening habits. The borders between genres that once felt rigid — jazz for the discerning, Afro-fusion for the initiated, pop for the masses — are dissolving. Younger listeners are reaching back, curating sonic diets that include the textured, the patient, the musically dense.

At the same time, older audiences are loosening their grip on what they once defined as “their” sound, welcoming reinterpretations, collaborations and new voices. It is, in many ways, a moment of convergence. A crossroads.

Into this moment arrivesTake Me Home, Freshlyground’s first body of work in seven years, a project that feels less like a comeback and more like a recalibration. Not just of sound but of identity. When I speak to Simon Attwell, the band’s manager and co-founder, there is a noticeable ease in how he situates the new chapter.

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He is not trying to convince anyone of its importance. Instead, he traces its evolution with the kind of clarity that comes from hindsight. “Freshlyground looks different now,” he tells me.

“Over the years the band has gone through some changes from when we first got together in 2002. We’ve had members leave and join over those years, right until Zolani went solo in 2019 and we took a break. But there was always a consistency, the core of the band was there.” That consistency, however, is not what definesTake Me Home.

If anything, the album is shaped by interruption — by the pause, the uncertainty and the unexpected arrival of a new voice. Mbali Makhoba, the band’s 20-year-old lead vocalist, was never meant to usher in a new era. At least, not initially.

“When we started performing again, the idea was just to find someone who could sing our catalogue and maybe get a few gigs here and there,” Attwell explains. “There was never an intention to write new material, to form a new entity. That wasn’t even in our consciousness.” “Very quickly when she joined, it became clear that she was much more interested in writing new material and finding her voice than trying to pretend she’s a replacement.

And that was very cool because she not only wrote very quickly but she wrote really beautiful stuff. And in performing the old repertoire, she made it her own.” There is a generosity in that observation, an understanding that continuity does not have to mean replication. That audiences, when invited into something honest, will meet it where it is.

The title track,Take Me Home, becomes the emotional centre of the album, not as a literal return but as a metaphorical one.“It’s about finding a safe space,” he explains. “Finding a place where one can feel at peace.”

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