In a world that increasingly champions speed of production and consumption, Paris-born Sudanese-American emcee Bas and London-based alt-R&B duo The Hics took a decidedly measured approach while crafting their first full-length collaborative album. Eight years in the making, Melanchronica is a moving collection of 10 songs that feature a meandering exploration of life and relationships. “We’ve been working on this album so long that we’ve kind of grown into different phases,” Bas says via a video call while taking a break from watching a football match.
Indeed, throughout his career, Bas has displayed dramatic stylistic and thematic range—from the confrontational “Don’t Front” in 2017 and the contemplative “Risk” with FKJ in 2019 to the festive “Passport Bros” with J. Cole in 2023. Given the new project’s extended gestation, part of the process mirrored the personal evolution and musical development of the musicians themselves. “As much as you want to get stuff out, I think the longer you get to work on something, one of the benefits is that you gain so much clarity about what everything is, what everything means. We fell upon this kind of melancholy world.”
As pensive as much of the LP’s music is, Bas sounds remarkably at ease throughout Melanchronica, a winding sonic journey that incorporates a deft mix of pop, hip-hop, and R&B. “We’re all big fans of sound experimentation and the proggy nature of music and its creation,” The Hics’ Sam Paul Evans says during a video call from London. “We’re not always like, ‘This is going to be ternary form A/B/A/B and then C.’ We like to experiment with hearing and throwing different sections over different pieces, and not always repeating the same melody that you’ll hear in verse one and in verse two. You kind of hear that throughout the album.”
Extended instrumental passages are indeed common throughout Melanchronica, providing unpredictable detours owing to both artists’ mutual willingness to take sonic risks. “You can hear our ADHD, for example, at the end of ‘San Junipero,’” Evans says of the song’s mesmerizing final 80 seconds. “It goes into a random percussive mashup, because we were like, ‘Yeah, that sounds nice.’ We like interludes. We like journeys, for it to feel like a story. We’ve tried to provide a familiar structure in the songwriting so people can understand that, ‘This is a chorus, this is a verse.’ We feel like we want to take it in a different direction, perhaps in an ode to how the people we would listen to back in the day would’ve done it—like Todd Rundgren or Fleetwood Mac or Frank Zappa. We might be like, ‘What would they do?’ and we’ll try to draw some inspiration from that era.”
“We want to take it in a different direction, perhaps in an ode to how the people we would listen to back in the day would’ve done it—like Todd Rundgren or Fleetwood Mac or Frank Zappa.” — The Hics’ Sam Paul Evans
The inventive musicality meshes well with the thematically introspective journey that builds on the artists’ first collaborations. In 2016, Bas and The Hics partnered on two tracks from the former’s second album, Too High to Riot. The moody “Matches” featured a combination of relationship and social commentary, while “Ricochet” delved deep into introspection, inspiration, and intuition. With Melanchronica, though, Bas and The Hics honed in more on interpersonal relationships, with Bas and Hics’ vocalist Roxane Barker often playing off each other. The freedom to explore different sounds and styles helped Bas and Barker write songs that could be both in-the-moment and reflect timeless emotions. “We were never given rules by which to program the album,” Barker says. “So many different genres of music have been popular since 2017 that we weren’t trying to fit into any of them, because we didn’t know when it would come out anyway, so we just went with the flow.”
With “Everyday Ppl,” for instance, Barker at times takes a decidedly explicit stance in a song where she also sings about her quest to get into her lover’s mind. “It was an improvisation,” she says. “I was just [humming the melody] and it just came out. I wrote the chorus first, maybe three months before I wrote the verse. So when I revisited it, I was like, ‘Sometimes when you’re in a relationship and you’re having all these fights, it’s like, “What happened to us? Do you remember when we used to fuck?”’ Even if you’re at a club, it could be, ‘I just want to have sex with you.’ I don’t want to fight that feeling. When you see someone you like, it’s like, ‘What’s up with all these pretenses? Let’s just get to it.’”
The rest of Melanchronica contains equally charged lyrics, even if they fall on the opposite end of the spectrum spanning lust and love. In fact, Barker took a different angle when she heard angelic elements on a different track. “If I hear something that clearly evokes an emotion, I just follow it,” she says. “On ‘Out of Sight,’ it has very romantic strings at the beginning. When I heard it, I instantly was like, ‘Oh, I’m falling in love,’ and then just built around that. I kind of just let the music speak to me.”
“What’s great about collaborating with people of varied genres and styles is that you kind of end up with these beautiful little melting pots of what we all do.” — Bas
Since writing about love and a mental and spiritual connection with someone isn’t a major focus of modern R&B and soul music, it was important for Bas to make that a focus of this LP. “That’s lacking now,” he says. “That’s the music that I’ve always preferred, the music that elicited emotion from me, that was forcing me to kind of have a deeper conversation with myself. It’s like they say, you’ve got to be the self you miss sometimes. It’s something that I really value working with The Hics on, because I feel like they help bring that out of me. And what’s great about collaborating with people of varied genres and styles is that you kind of end up with these beautiful little melting pots of what we all do.”
By taking their time while crafting Melanchronica, Bas and The Hics were able to identify and fully traverse the mental, spiritual, and emotional themes that drove them. “Very early on, we had a very strong direction and a conviction to follow through on it,” Bas says. “It’s emotional—the music is emotional, the lyrics are emotional. It’s vulnerable. It’s melancholy. It’s a little somber. It’s real, and we didn’t want to deviate. You want to tour on an album. You want people to love the whole thing. You want it to mean something special to them. When you operate from there, you’ve got to trim the fat and stay true to it.” FL
