Today, Blue Note Records announced There Is No End, a posthumous album from the legendary Afrobeat drummer Tony Allen, who died last year at the age of 79. Featuring guest rappers and singers including Sampa The Great, Danny Brown, Lava La Rue, and more, the new full-length will be released on April 30, 2021, the one year anniversary of Allen’s death. The preorder launches today along with the first single “Cosmosis (ft. Skepta & Ben Okiri).” Check it out below…
There Is No End was produced by Tony Allen, Vincent Taeger, and Vincent Taurelle — Allen had produced and written all the album’s beats back in 2019 alongside Taeger. In thinking back on the process of finalizing There Is No End without Tony physically present to guide them, Taeger remarked that his friend and mentor “was a teacher without speaking… a drummer and a guardian, with a great artistic vision and that vision filled the songs even after he had left us.” Renowned Nigerian novelist and poet Ben Okri, like everyone else involved in this valedictory album, had a very similar experience, declaring in awe that “this man could have lived another 150 years and kept creating new worlds. He had become the master shaman of his art. He knew himself and his mind. He wanted the album to be open to the energies of a new generation… but like a great mathematician or scientist who found a code for a new world, with just a few beats, he created this extraordinary canvas.”
ony Allen’s singular talent didn’t end when the music stopped. For all those who knew him, he was a deeply spiritual man whose life’s mission was not just to create a new musical language, but to pass it on to subsequent generations. As he put it, “I’m just doing my best to please the universe. Life’s a boomerang, you know? You create bad or good [and] it comes back to you.” Right up to this, his last album, his thoughts were for the younger artists who continued to flock to him, especially in the fraught historical and political moment in which we live. “I want to take care of youngsters; they have messages and I want to bring them on my beat. The idea is to transmit to the young generation, to mix different universes – the hip hop world to the Afrobeat world.”
Tracklisting:
- Tony’s Praeludium
- Stumbling Down (feat. Sampa The Great)
- Crushed Grapes (feat. Lord Jah-Monte Ogbon)
- Très Magnifique (feat. Tsunami)
- Mau Mau (feat. Nah Eeto)
- Coonta Kinte (feat. Zelooperz)
- Rich Black (feat. Koreatown Oddity)
- One Inna Million (feat. Lava La Rue)
- Gang On Holiday (Em I Go We?) (feat. Jeremiah Jae)
- Deer In Headlights (feat. Danny Brown)
- Hurt Your Soul (feat. Nate Bone)
- My Own (feat. Marlowe)
- Cosmosis (feat. Ben Okri & Skepta)
- There’s No End
