SAUL WILLIAMS – Conspiracy
Saul Williams has announced Leap Life, his first album in seven years, due August 28th on Big Dada, the label that put out his earliest solo work. The list of contributors is genuinely stacked: Massive Attack’s Robert Del Naja, Kamasi Washington, longtime collaborator Carlos Niño, Georgia Anne Muldrow, and Surya Botofasina all appear across the record, while Gonjasufi and Moor Mother both show up on lead single “Conspiracy.” The video is directed by Cleon Arrey.
The album takes its title from Williams’ leap-year birthday, but the framing he’s given it is heavier than that detail suggests. He describes Leap Life as an attempt to commune with the dead, set against ongoing devastation in Palestine, Sudan, Haiti, Congo, and Yemen. “We’re going to need those spirits,” he says. “There’s an understanding that the soldiers in our struggle are not only the visible ones. There are people standing and fighting with us that we may not see.” That’s a striking way to frame a record, less a metaphor about legacy and more a literal claim about who’s still in the fight. Pairing Gonjasufi’s distorted, half-buried vocal style with Moor Mother’s confrontational delivery on the same track feels like the right way to open a record built on that idea.
This is Williams’ first solo full-length since Unanimous Goldmine, the 2022 score for his directorial debut Neptune Frost. In the years between, he’s starred in the acclaimed film Sinners, released a graphic novel, and toured a dance production called The Motherboard Suite. Leap Life sounds like the place where all of that converges back into one record.
