Brandon Coleman is a keyboardist/vocalist/songwriter/arranger/producer from Los Angeles who has long been sought after, collaborating with everyone from Babyface to Flying Lotus over the years. Most of the time, he can be found as part of Kamasi Washington’s stellar ensemble. He released his first solo album, Self Taught, in 2015, before signing with Brainfeeder, who released his 2018 album, Resistance. Now he’s returned with his most ambitious album to date, Interstellar Black Space.

Sometimes you listen to a new album and part of its appeal is that it feels familiar, or at the very least you can tell where the artist is going with their music. On rare occasion, you listen to a new album, and you quickly realize that all bets are off and you better just strap in and go along for the ride. This is the feeling I had with Interstellar Black Space. Just moving from the meditative opening prologue of “Lucid Dreaming (Opening),” to the prince-esque funk of “On the One,” I could tell I was in for something special. Over the course of the album, Coleman is taking us through a music journey where he weaves together everything from hard bop to free jazz, electro-boogie to yacht rock, funk to soul, R&B to hip hop, psychedelic rock to glam rock. It’s an album where Sun Ra, Mingus, Bowie, Sly Stone and Dazz all get to hang out together. The key to making all of this work is a combination of Coleman and company’s top notch musicianship, but also Coleman’s clever songwriting and arranging. Coleman clearly had an idea about bringing in Afrofuturism and pushing the music forward to explore these ideas about what it means to look ahead and up to the stars to imagine a better society for Black people, but he’s also reaching backward to put his music in conversation with this long and rich lineage of Black American music as well. This is the great thing about Interstellar Black Space. Coleman is bringing all of these musical and philosophical and political ideas to the table, and so much is happening at any one moment, but at the same time Coleman has arranged everything so that there is always a melody, rhythm, or main idea in the lyrics that you can hold on to as you process everything else. It’s an incredibly rich text that you can keep returning to over and over again, but it’s never so complicated that you’ll just be overwhelmed and want to give up. There’s always something fun, beautiful, and exciting coming around the corner.

Interstellar Black Space is one of the most unique and ambitious albums you will hear this year. Brandon Coleman has shown that he’s not just a sideman or someone who thrives behind the scenes. When it’s his turn to step to the spotlight, it’s because he’s been very deliberate and carefully crafted something that will cause you to think, feel, and move on a very deep and soulful level. When he returned with Interstellar Black Space, he leveled up in a way that few could truly say they were anticipating. This is one of the most pleasant surprises of the year.