“I hope Melanchronica brings listeners emotions, feelings. I hope they cry to it. I hope they find joy in it. I just want them to feel. So many emotions went into making it. So many nights of us really trying to peel back the layers of this onion, and bear all of ourselves on it and be as vulnerable as we could be, because we know that these emotions we go through, everyone does.” - Bas tells OkayAfrica.
I remember sitting at my kitchen table one night in spring when someone sent me Melanchronica, a collaborative album by Sudanese American rapper Bas and London-based duo The Hics. I took a listen and immediately knew that this was a special project. By the time I had reached "Sometimes," the 7-minute-long outro, I had dissolved into feelings of nostalgia and joy, playing the song on a loop.
Bas and The Hics, a duo comprising Roxane Barker and Sam Paul Evans, have cultivated their shared creativity over the past decade. They collaborated on tracks for Bas' sophomore album, Milky Way, as well as The Messenger podcast after Bas heard The Hics' "Cold Air" on GTA 5 Radio and DM'd them while passing through London on tour with J. Cole.
"I always try to seek out people who bring me out of my comfort zone and inspire me to achieve a different level in my artistry," says Bas. "Whenever I work with [The Hics], there's just a lot of emotional depth to the music. Their writing is very poetic, and they're intentional with their wording."
Melanchronica began in 2017 with "Four Walls," a song about heartbreak and longing for lost love. It was too chronically melancholic for Milky Way's summery vibe, so Bas held it back. But the world and soundscapes they had created begged to be explored further.
"The song was like one of those vulnerable moments and thoughts that you might not share with others or might not even like to admit to yourself until you get that sonic landscape that evokes that emotion out of you," says Bas. "At least in our culture, music is a bit devoid of emotion right now."
They continued working on what would eventually become Melanchronica, a cinematic, textured invitation to feel it all. At the intersection of Bas' New York-cool rap style and The Hics' genre-bending sound, which blends elements of soul, electronic, jazz, and alternative R&B, effortless chemistry has birthed to one of the rare projects that you can listen to from start to finish without skipping a single track, and then repeat.
"To have that much time making music in this day and age is [a privilege]," says Bas, echoing musicians like Morocco's Stormy and Small X. "We're stuck in a music consumption rat race and trying to stay relevant. But we had the time to really cook this." Melanchronica comes right on the heels of Egyptian rapper Marwan Moussa's prediction that rap music was changing. "I think we'll hear music that feels like more time has been spent making it," he told OkayAfrica in May.
Track five, named after the standout Black Mirror episode "San Junipero," is one of the album's more energetic songs. Evans' grungy bassline immediately drew Bas in. "It's emotional, but aggressive and has a bounce," he says. "Black Mirror is one of the most culturally relevant media, filled with so many warnings of the human condition and society that we're heading into."
My favorite songs as of now are "Erewhon" and "Sometimes." "Those are solid choices, I think I'd agree with you there," Bas says. Both tracks were written at Harbor Studio in Malibu, which was lost to the LA wildfires this year.
"Outside coasting while I move a mile a minute/ Aldi to Erewhon that's some mileage on a feelin/ I don't wanna spend no more money on you!/ Got a lotta problems I'll pay for them too" Bas raps in "Erewhon."
Photo by Linus Johnson
"Erewhon is the most LA of LA grocery stores," Bas says with a grin. "$20 smoothies and you might get an avocado sandwich and have to take out a loan. But it's good, though, I'm not gonna lie."
The track confronts artistic progress and, as a result, the improvement of one's material comfort levels — from London's Aldi to LA's Erewhon — which is one of the album's central themes. After attaining a higher lifestyle, one often realizes that it does not guarantee greater happiness or fulfillment. "Every time you reach those moments, you're not content. You're trying to find the next glass ceiling to shatter," says Bas.
Dualities, self-reflection, and longing resound through Melanchronica and are felt as the timeless and existential conditions they are. For Bas, longing specifically took on a more complicated dimension with the outbreak of war in Khartoum, Sudan, in 2023.
He used to spend every December at his family home in Bahri, which had become a base for the Rapid Support Forces until the Sudanese Armed Forces recently recaptured the city.
"When things get as dire as they have, you understand the value of having those roots, traditions, and that piece of history," says Bas. "To be in a hometown where all the families in the neighborhood go back centuries, having a cemetery I can visit with generations of my family buried there. To have all that ripped from you is depressing. Nothing's been the same."
In his writing, Bas personifies longing and desire to make the sentiment more relatable. "You might not have lost a country, but the emotion at the core is the same," he says. "It's just like, damn I miss you, I want you back."
Even though Bas agrees with me on my favorites, his is "Roxane's Interlude." "I like when Roxanne takes front and center and we get to, kind of, pepper around that," he says. "I like those songs that remind me of those classic R&B summer records I grew up on. This dominant female lead, and then a cool rap verse to throw in there."
Melanchronica is his first collaborative album; it takes patience, trust, and compromise to put a project like this together. "Professionally and creatively, I grew a lot," he says. "I am maturing as an artist and as a man. I've gained the confidence to shed a little more of the bravado that's expected of us in our genre, really tap into the depth of my artistry, and see where I can go."
If he could, he would like to go home. To Sudan. Practice his Arabic, restore the family house, and nurture a connection that was weakened when his mother passed away.
It might be this shared longing for our parents' home that touched me so deeply when listening to Melanchronica. But whatever it is you are longing for, reflecting on, and feeling melancholic about, this album will hold and nurture you in the process.
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