How nice it is to find something new in genres as crushed as hardcore or crossover. This debut album by Zulu It’s a collection of songs that have the classic coordinates of these styles imbued with them, but if you sharpen your eyes hard you might come to think that “A New Tomorrow” isn’t really a hardcore or crossover record. Because this remarkable record birth is not limited exclusively to shouting a couple of truths in an environment that respects a certain genre, but rather uses this genre to declare intentions in the middle of a work in which other elements appear beyond labels. –spoken word, soul, reggae, funk– make what we are listening to more of a philosophical manifesto based on open-mindedness and cultural claims.
“Africa” It is the instrumental that opens the plate, the task of the instrumentation governed by piano and strings makes us think of a fairy tale, of someone who with theatrical movements enters a new world, a new tomorrow, precisely. The intensity of the instrumental rises and explodes in the first riff of “For Sista Humphrey” that taking up the feeling of the first Cro-Mags exposes the first guttural voices… to culminate with a dusty and lysergic soul sample. The same happens with the end of the third theme, the almost grindcore “Our Time Is Now” which, after a riff as dense as lead, offers a 70s dancehall interlude so that the power immediately returns with “Music To Driveby”theme, again, happily interrupted by a sample of Curtis Mayfield.
Let’s see, the album is not for purists, and that’s the best it has. His crazy way of combining environments makes it seem like a most eclectic mixtape, but everything makes sense here. Zulu is an African-American boy band from Los Angeles with a need to say things. Things that they say precisely with their shouting voices, but also with artistic-sound decisions (the chill out instrumental “Shine Eternally”) and of course with his speech, which seems to reach its maximum expression in the precious text of “Cream de Cassis” in which the role and concept of blackness in the United States is discussed; idea consequently accompanied by perfect nineties chill hop that is “We’re More Than This” and even by another snippet of the value: the version of “Small Axe” of Bob Marley that closes the album as the final part of “Who Jah Bless, No One Curse”maybe the best theme “A New Tomorrow” brimming with aggressive and progressive spirit. An unmissable debut and a fresh breeze for the saturated world of extreme music.