Joshua Idehen – I Know You’re Hurting, Everyone Is Hurting, Everyone Is Trying, You Have Got To Try
Joshua Idehen’s debut solo album, released March 6, 2026 on Heavenly Recordings, is a house and drum’n’bass record built around spoken word, made with Swedish producer Ludvig Parment, and it arrives with a thesis written right into its title: you’re not alone in this.
Idehen spent years moving through London’s cultural underground — collaborating with Sons Of Kemet and The Comet Is Coming, performing at Glastonbury, building a reputation as a spoken word artist with real range.
The breakthrough was “Mum Does The Washing”, a single that dismantles ideological frameworks one by one using the image of a mother doing laundry. Colonialism, capitalism, white feminism, TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminist): each gets its verse, skewered with a light touch and a line that lands. It remains the sharpest piece of writing on the record.
I caught him live on December 2, 2025 in Heidelberg, opening for Baxter Dury. It was a Tuesday evening, and Idehen fit the bill perfectly: electro-dance tracks, “Mum Does The Washing” landing exactly as it should, and he really dance and executes elegant moves (considerably more elegant than Dury’s 🙂 ). Five songs, including a handful that doesn’t appear on the album, and by the end the room had loosened up in a way that felt like exactly the point. Good preparation for the record.
The album opens with “You Wanna Dance Or What?”, a panic attack inside the club. Idehen is deep in the music when the world collapses inward. A stranger puts a hand on his shoulder and pulls him back. That gesture — small, human, unremarkable — becomes the emotional centre of the whole record. The club here isn’t just a setting. It’s the argument: a place where people can still find each other, where rhythm and proximity do what policies and social media can’t. “This Is The Place” makes this explicit, sampling a voice asking what it’s all about. The answer comes back: “the rhythm, and the love”. It’s a little on the nose, but Idehen earns it.
Parment’s production is built to carry the weight. Sixteen tracks, mostly house, with detours into drum’n’bass, UK garage, filter house, and free jazz. The mix in “Brother” is particularly good: saxophone running alongside jungle breaks, frantic and barely-held-together, while Idehen asks “Is this your masculinity or just your trauma speaking?” “Whatever Comes” follows, slower, rougher, analog synths under crumbling breakbeats. Idehen watches a friend fall apart in Leicester Square and wonders if his presence is enough. It’s one of the record’s quieter moments, and one of its best. “Don’t Let It Get You Down” swings the other direction: staccato house beat, aerobics instructor samples, Idehen drilling encouragement over a classic floor-filler construction. Shabaka Hutchings shows up with flute on the record, returning the favour after Idehen’s years of collaboration with his projects.
What makes the album work as a full listen, and not just a collection of polemics with beats, is that Idehen is writing from personal experience rather than just taking a position. He went through a divorce and several suicide attempts. He spent time being the kind of online troll he later spent years writing against. The politics on this record aren’t abstract. They’re the conclusion someone arrives at after doing real damage and then figuring out how to do better. Lines like “If there is no love in the law, choose Crime” land differently when the person saying them has lived on both sides of that equation.
What I keep coming back to is how the record manages to stay honest about how bad things are while never sounding defeated. That’s a harder balance to pull off than it looks.
Not everything lands with equal force. The male romantic insecurity of “My Love” goes soft where it should cut, and a few tracks tip past encouragement into something closer to self-help. But those moments are outnumbered by the ones that work, and when Idehen and Parment are fully aligned, the combination of language and beat is hard to shake. It’s a debut that sounds like someone who had a lot to say and finally found the right room to say it in, which is undoubtedly why it’s here.
