This poppy, life-affirming ode to gay domestic bliss is a paean to black people ‘living their damn life anyhow’
There can be few albums this year more wholesome, soppy or unabashedly life-affirming than Deacon, the second full-length outing from Serpentwithfeet, a man whose many facial tattoos include a large pentagram in a circle on his forehead and the new album’s title in block capitals across his throat. Across 11 varied tracks, Deacon is a doom-banishing celebration of love and friendship, a record bathed in California sunshine and gratitude. It is not only at stark odds with the maverick songwriter-producer’s forbidding-looking presence – nose ring, hair in horn-like pigtails – but also with his previous body of work.
Born in Baltimore, transplanted to Brooklyn, but now happily ensconced in Los Angeles, 32-year-old Josiah Wise grew up singing in church, an experience that has coloured his gospel-infused take on R&B. But he also trained in jazz and the classical tradition. This eclectic corpus of knowledge has given rise to a series of arresting EPs and a previous album, 2018’s Soil, full of heavenly vocal gymnastics as well as arrhythmic, atypical chamber-pop inflections. In 2017, he went on tour with indie band Grizzly Bear and duetted with Björk, a fellow traveller in vocal effusion. Since then, Serpentwithfeet has added rapper Ty Dolla Sign, Ellie Goulding and designer-turned-musician Virgil Abloh to his gamut of collaborators.
Deacon presents same-sex black love as healing and transcendental, full of tenderness, humour and glasses of prosecco