The new recording, set to be released at 12:00 a.m. EST on 3 November to coincide with the election, comes in the backdrop of tragic events that have recently shaken the black family such as the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and several other unarmed Blacks. The artist’s team also notes the recent bloody repression of peaceful demonstrators in Nigeria, and the Trump administration’s horrible record in terms of social justice. “It’s more than ever a time for Blackness to be celebrated, revered and appreciated for all of its many facets,” the Denver, Colorado-based artist states, while saluting the Black Lives Matter Movement. Kid Astronaut tells “The African Magazine”:

“For Black people across the world and the diaspora, our journey has been fraught with the various emotions that accompany our experience. Struggle, triumph, joy, and pain. ‘Black Is’ is the expression of such emotions.”

Denver’s Kid Astronaut is a musician who has traveled globally, performing across the U.S. and Europe.

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Kid Astronaut says the lyrics of his song “tell the story of Black culture, noting how it is in our culture that originate most of the trends and style worldwide; and while people may try to emulate what we offer, it can never be replicated, duplicated. No.”

The song is also a tribute to black cultural icons: poets, dancers, griots, preachers, teachers, kings and queens, not to mention the black youth.

Set to a groovy, vibey beat by Gladwell, the track “Black Is” harkens back to the original style and substance not very much seen within Hip Hop culture nowadays with influences ranging from J Dilla to Mos Def, Black Thought and The Roots and the intelligence and lyrical vibrance of poets and speakers such as Maya Angelou and Dave Chappelle. The stunning artwork by an Ivorian photographer shows the hands of a black male in a prayer position somewhere out at sea, which brings to mind both the passage of immigrants into a new country and the Middle Passage, the journey Black slaves brought to the Americas in the early 1500s, packed in the belly of ships like sardines.

With “Black Is,” Kid Astronaut hopes that “this will remind Black people worldwide of our beauty and our contribution. Although, like the lyrics say, ‘We are not perfect,’ we strive for it, and it is his hope that we continue to strive towards an imagined future of greatness, global impact and to truly shine fully as ourselves because we are ‘the heartbeat of the sun.'”