Swindle and Ashton Sellars on the Long Build Behind Kojey Radical’s Don’t Look Down

Don’t Look Down opens with a question Kojey Radical poses rather than answers: what do you do when you have the world at your feet? The album that follows treats that as a problem to work through, setting hip-hop against jazz, gospel and R&B while its author takes stock of success, turning thirty and new fatherhood. MOBO and Mercury Prize nominations arrived on the back of it.

Two people share much of the credit for how it sounds. Producer Swindle and guitarist Ashton Sellars served as executive producers, a partnership that began at the first songwriting camp convened for the project. Sellars was booked for two days. The stay ran to two and a half weeks and then, as Swindle puts it, two and a half years.

Both arrived with long histories behind them. Swindle came up through pirate radio and released on Brownswood and Butterz before scoring television drama. Sellars, a guitarist from New Zealand, has worked with Burna Boy, Chance the Rapper and Denzel Curry. Across sixteen tracks their task was partly curatorial: keeping sessions moving while a wide cast, among them Femi Koleoso of Ezra Collective, MNEK, Ghetts, Dende and Benjamin AD, kept adding to the pile.

Recording ran between Decoy Studios in Suffolk and sessions at Abbey Road, with playlists and references circulated before anything was built from scratch. Sellars describes that early stage plainly. “At the very beginning, there’s no vision as such. You’re just throwing paint at the wall.” The finished record suggests the paint eventually landed.