Duval Timothy: Freetown Sound

The post-minimalist and Kendrick Lamar collaborator strikes again

This week, I’ve been playing the new Duval Timothy album wishful thinking on repeat.

I’m not sure if Ethan Iverson or Matthew Shipp would approve.

To be clear, I’m not comparing Timothy’s work to the iPhone sketches of a certain iconic ex-rapper, but he’s clearly no Jarrett-like virtuoso either; he’s a brilliant melody writer though, and in a notoriously crowded space, he’s created a style so distinctly his own that you can recognize it after a few chords.

Timothy’s style is often labeled jazz. I think it’s post-minimalist (or, if you dare say it, neoclassical) piano music with slight hints of jazz and electronic. Applying a wider genre understanding, you could also just call it ambient-slash-experimental, I guess. Still, it’s way closer to Max Richter or Ludovico Einaudi than it is to Ethan Iverson or Matthew Shipp.

Asked about his influences on a 2024 podcast, Duval Timothy mentioned Ryuichi Sakamoto, Kristin Oppenheim and LaMonte Young. Many of his fans won’t regularly listen to Sakamoto or know who Kristin Oppenheim is (even the podcast host asks him, “Who’s LaMonte Young?”). Since Timothy’s music has been sampled by Solange and Kendrick Lamar, he’s become a household name to more casual music fans too.

An introvert at heart, Timothy never performs live – except for some impromptu concerts on his blue-painted balcony in Freetown, Sierra Leone, playing his blue upright piano. Blue is the colour of his home borough of Lewisham, Southeast London; as a dedicated minimalist, Timothy also has an all-blue wardrobe to minimize his everyday choices.

The son of two artists – an English mother and a father with roots in Sierra Leone and Ghana –, Timothy went to art school in London and self-released his first album, 2012’s Dukobanti, on Soundcloud and Bandcamp. He was 23 at the time.

Over the next decade, he dabbled in many things. Aside from making music, he designed and manufactured clothes, worked as a chef, co-ran a pop-up restaurant, authored a recipe book and even became a semi-professional football player in Sierra Leone, where he chooses to spend much of his time.

The South Londoner’s artistic profile started building with his second album, 2016’s Brown Loop. Through lauded follow-ups like 2017’s Sen Am and 2020’s Help, he managed to build a sizable audience for his particular brand of instrumental music, which looped and layered piano chords, electronic textures, field recordings and voice messages.

Like some of his growth-hacking peers, he profited off the “ambient boom” of the pandemic years. But while Swedish playlist-pianists still tried to imitate Nils Frahm’s warm felt sound, Timothy played an upright with the felt fallen off the hammers due to the West African humidity.

Still, some of his less complex tracks did suit the definition of “Peaceful Piano”; there was also a certain golden era hip-hop edge to his music that doesn’t so much come across in his aesthetic choices (most of it is stripped of rhythmic elements), but through an underlying sensibility for sampling techniques. You could hear that Timothy grew up on American rap, and some of his tracks sounded as if they were primarily made to be sampled.

Given that notion, it’s not surprising that one of his early fans was Kendrick Lamar, who loved Brown Loop’s “Through the Night” so much that he used it as the backdrop for one of his own tracks. After a few years of secret collaboration, Timothy hopped on a plane to Los Angeles for studio recordings in early 2022. His co-writing and -production credits would appear on four songs from Lamar’s blockbuster double album Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers.

He must have had a few offers on the table at the time. As he still regretted signing away the Brown Loop masters to some label start-up, he chose to remain independent. Until this day, he’s released all of his solo music under his own Carrying Colour imprint.

In a Pitchfork profile, Timothy said: “I love outsiders: little micro-cultures of musicians who don’t enter the system. It feels like there are less true subcultures now; things get associated with brands. But it’s cool when you hear something from a place.”

A nice segue to wishful thinking, his newest album, which arrived as a surprise release last week after a period of relative quietness. Both his last album and the Kendrick record came out in 2022 – three years of relative silence feel like eons in the fast-paced streaming age. But Timothy didn’t seem overly bothered with maintaining a steady flow of music. He became a father, worked on some art projects, and lived life.

In the mid- to late 2010s, Timothy started spending more time in his father’s home country of Sierra Leone, staying in a Freetown house that once belonged to his great-grandmother and turning its basement floor into a DIY recording studio (what he’s been calling a “glorified bedroom studio”). He’s been living between London and Freetown ever since, spending a couple of months of each year in Sierra Leone.

The central theme of the new record is established in the first three minutes. From the opening notes over field recordings of city traffic, Timothy’s handwriting is unmistakable. Then a funky electric bassline comes in, and a highlife-style guitar evokes dusty images of West Africa.

While his last album, Meeting With a Judas Tree, featured six longer compositions building on collaborations with experimental electronic producers Yu Su, Fauzia, Lamin Fofana and Vegyn, wishful thinking consists of 16 shorter, sketch-like (again, no 3 stacks comparison) tunes with little outside influence. The songs have evocative one-word titles in lowercase letters: “road”, “bloom”, “dad”, “grass”, “sleep”, “magic”.

The record’s character and mood are summarized in the one-two punch of “stock”, which combines simple piano arpeggios with typical West African guitar Iines, and “cement” with its slightly melancholic melodies over dreamy guitar, synth bass and these idiosyncratic chord progressions that no one does just like Duval Timothy.

His music still sounds unabashedly gorgeous, often verging on the border of sugary clichés; but just at the right moment, he makes sure to throw the listener a curveball, such as the wobbly tape effects in the middle of the second track “big flex”, another co-production with Vegyn, the fellow London producer known for his work for Frank Ocean and Travis Scott.

It’s safe to say that wishful thinking is not a departure in style, quite the opposite in fact – it’s a mosaic reminding us of Duval Timothy’s most intricate qualities. Far from being banal or overly manipulative, it’s a summery, uplifting body of work with an atmosphere of calm serenity – one to play all the way through and put on repeat.