Sam Akpro on the South London scene and his liminal debut album, 'Evenfall' • Interview • DIY Magazine

“I don’t think anything is ‘not cool’,” Sam Akpro says whilst reflecting on building the world around his debut album, ‘Evenfall’. “I’ve come to realise that the perspective is just different. In their world it’s cool, but in your world it’s not, and then in their world, you’re not cool. It’s like [the meme of] Spiderman pointing at himself.”

As we catch up with the Peckham native over a pint at Strongrooms in Shoreditch, Akpro is giving DIY an insight into the space that facilitates his creativity, revealing that this extends past the sonic realm – he’s currently in the middle of creating an ‘Evenfall’ universe with a self-made scrapbook-slash-zine, and a prose counterpart, courtesy of poet and musician James Massiah. “That stuff is cool because all my favourite artists have done it. Even if I only ever read it once, it’s just cool to have it,” he says, referring to the nerdiness of fanzines.

While some artists are intentional, mapping out every part of the process, Sam’s approach appears to be subtler – almost spiritual – as if music is the conduit through which he’s able to communicate his observations on the world. Trying to describe him is almost futile. Everything you need to know is in the music; it’s a feeling. A self-confessed introvert (“I don’t speak a lot; I’m pretty quiet, and I guess that feeds into the music”), it becomes apparent as our conversation transpires that he’s simply just tapped into the right frequency.

Surprisingly, with a Gambian mother and a father hailing from the Ivory Coast, it was a BBC Concert Orchestra performance by Elbow that first struck a chord in him. “My family would be playing Gambian music and gospel Highlife,” Akpro explains, “but when I heard Elbow, I was quite fascinated. Every day after school, I would go on BBC iPlayer and watch it. That was my first ever musical thing that I was like, ‘What the fuck is this? Who are these people?’”

Fast forward to 2018, while studying Biomedical Science at Kingston University, he had another musical epiphany, after stumbling across Gorillaz at Hampshire festival Boomtown. Captivated, he left with the intention of buying the gear to make his own music. “I liked science, and was good at it, but I think I chose it just to keep my parents happy,” he says of his decision to drop out of university. “It was good to try it and know that I don’t want to do it. I took a risk leaving university to do music, but I guess it’s working a little bit,” he continues, a slow smile appearing across his face.

Outside of his experience at Boomtown, he never had a tangible example of a music community until he started going to shows with his friend and Ammi Boyz member Marley. “The first thing I did was get a laptop. I was listening to K-Trap, hip hop, and drill, and copying that shit,” he reveals of his early musical attempts. “I decided that I wanted to play guitar because I was listening to Tame Impala, and then [I heard] Travis Scott’s ‘ASTROWORLD’ album. That basically influenced me into putting different sounds together.”

Just a year later, when Sam arrived on the scene with his 2019 EP, ‘Night’s Away’, the blueprint of his genreless sound was already there. On its heels came ‘Drift’ (2021) and ‘Arrival’ (2023) – the latter written in Strongrooms Studios, just a few feet from where we’re sat today – which cemented him as a fully formed artist. “I haven’t made that many songs in my life, so every single time I’ve made a song – whether it’s unconscious or conscious – there has always been a creative intention behind it, without trying to sound all fancy,” he muses, pondering where experimentation ends and intuition begins. “Even though I feel like I’m still experimenting, I don’t know how, but those EPs just magically happened. Even some of those songs, I don’t know what they mean. It’s crazy – it’s some spiritual shit!”

“I took a risk leaving uni to do music, but I guess it’s working out a little bit.”

In order to create a world for others to lose themselves in, you must trust your instincts. With ‘Evenfall’, Akpro had six years to learn to become a better producer and songwriter. Working alongside co-producers Shrink and Finn Billingham, he excavated his hard drives and curated a batch of songs that feel like you’re wandering around his psyche. Would you like to take the blue pill that invites the listener into a dreamscape which subconsciously unfurls around you, or take a red pill to venture down a carefully mapped-out route, with no side quests along the way? For Sam, it was the former. “I think the judgment was more based on the feelings of each song. That’s what makes it cohesive – it’s the feeling, not necessarily the sounds of everything. It’s not like we’ve got the same guitar on every song. It’s more that they’ve got the same frequency,” he explains.

‘Evenfall’ opens with a wonky, warped guitar and saxophone shrill, which sounds like sirens racing across a metropolis teeming with life. Akpro’s intuitive writing style is cinematic and evocative – almost immersive – as the tracks sweep you off your feet and hold you in the palm of their hand, moving from frenetic post-punk, to washed out shoegaze, distorted jazz, and programmed synths tapped into the frequency of the sacred sound Om. This amorphous sound offers reprieve as he explores the malaise of living in a city that is often impossible to keep up with. The album’s singles showcase the advent of Sam Akpro, who introduced himself boldly on his first EPs, but its title track - which he confesses was his least favourite when it was written - showcases his knack for being a vessel that’s tapped into the spiritual nature of art.

It’s music for being sucked in and out of a mushroom trip, where you’re tethered to earth only by your body whilst your mind is taken elsewhere. ‘Baka’, one of the oldest songs on the album, serves as a moment of meditation; the glitchy instrumental is like something out of The Matrix. At first intense, as your mind is spliced into a million tiny pieces, it dissipates into something softer, something holy, as a sense of calm washes over you in a sound-bath of ethereality. ‘Cornering Lights’, meanwhile, feels like watching the sun rise through a gap in the curtains at an afters: Akpro’s languid vocals glides over the instrumental which pushes and pulls between sparse rhythmic elements, while a dawn chorus of synths mimic the desire to fight the comedown and escape reality for just a little while longer.

Back in 2018, Akpro had no idea that any of this was possible. “I didn’t even know what a gig was. There’s no context of that in my brain because I don’t really come from that kind of culture,” he confesses. “All of this was new to me at an older age, where I was kind of just discovering myself. I dropped my first bit of music in 2019, put out my first EP in the middle of 2019, and then I had a band by August. We did a headline show in September of the same year, and there were like 100 people there. It’s mad!” he laughs.

As the release of his debut album and celebratory headline show at London’s MOTH Club approaches, Akpro is looking to the future. He admits “it’s kinda scary” not really knowing what the year is going to look like, but for now, he has decided to relinquish control to the universe. It’s worked this far, so why not?

‘Evenfall’ is out now via ANTI/Epitaph.

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