PHANTOM OF THE AFTERS

There is something uniquely Irish about leaving home and immediately becoming more conscious of where you came from. Distance has a way of turning the things you barely noticed into defining characteristics: your accent becomes louder, familiar expressions suddenly sound strange, a decent pint takes on unreasonable importance, and the idea of home becomes simultaneously comforting and suffocating. On PHANTOM OF THE AFTERS, Kojaque turns that contradiction into one of the most complete Irish records of all time.

The character of Jackie Dandelion, inspired by the Fontaines D.C. hit ‘Jackie Down the Line’, gives the album its shape. He is part alter ego, part caricature, an exaggerated version of the Irishman abroad, carrying confidence, insecurity, ambition and homesickness around London simultaneously. From the opening of ‘GOODBYE, JACKIE DANDELION’, we see his preemptive sense of regret and guilt of his ancestors leaving his hometown for broader horizons within the empire that once terrorised his people. This opening to the album sets undertones for the rest of the album.

That tension makes ‘LARRY BIRD’ such an effective introduction. Kojaque arrives in London with the swagger of someone determined to convince both himself and everybody else that leaving was the correct decision. His rapping throughout the album is exceptional; loose enough to sound conversational but technically controlled, constantly moving between jokes, observations and sudden moments of vulnerability. Reminiscent of his youth and his climb up the summit of the rap scene, he lavishes in the riches of substances that he can now attain with ease, and talks down upon his once competitors.

It would be easy for a record so specifically concerned with Irishness to become overly sentimental about home, but Kojaque is far more interesting than that. Dublin is never presented as some lost paradise. ‘CABRA DRIVE’ carries affection for the city without forgetting the reasons somebody might want to escape it. London offers opportunity but creates a different kind of loneliness. Neither place provides Jackie with the version of himself he expects to find.

The production mirrors that uncertainty beautifully. PHANTOM OF THE AFTERS moves between dusty hip-hop, jazz, soul, R&B and more abstract textures without feeling like Kojaque is trying on different genres for effect. The songs bleed into each other. Sounds and ideas disappear and return later. Even when the individual tracks are radically different, the record feels like one continuous night.

‘JOHNNY MCENROE’, alongside Wiki, is one of its strongest demonstrations of pure rapping. Their accents and flows seem worlds apart, a squeezed-in studio session in New York with the 2 emcees and producer Tony Seltzer led to the creation of a transatlantic rap classic. Kojaque remains braggadocious in his lyrical style in his singular verse. Wiki delivers a perfect synopsis of his rap style with sprinkles of reference to his Irish / Cuban descent and blends perfectly with Kojaque’s energy and style.

That matters because PHANTOM OF THE AFTERS understands Irish identity as something unstable rather than decorative. ‘FAT RONALDO / COVENT GARDENS’ gets particularly close to the centre of the record: leaving home can create a strange pressure to perform where you came from. Once you are somewhere else, other people begin defining your Irishness for you. Kojaque responds by exaggerating it, mocking it and interrogating it all at once.

But the album would not be nearly as powerful if it relied entirely on cultural identity. Its real subject is the person underneath it. The second side of the song ‘COVENT GARDENS’ is the first real sign of vulnerability and an eschewing of the grandeur and success that has been portrayed throughout the album so far, a lament on the stigma around mental health and the struggle of everyday life. This is where Jackie Dandelion is shown to be human; he can bleed, and here he bleeds strong.

‘YOKO OH NO!’ pulls away at the confidence Kojaque spends so much of the record constructing. Relationships throughout the album are messy, frequently funny and rarely romantic in a conventional sense. ‘WHAT IF?’ is particularly brilliant because its softness never becomes uncomplicated. Desire is inseparable from insecurity. Kojaque can imagine another life with somebody while simultaneously recognising all the ways he would probably ruin it. That balance between humour and emotional honesty may be his greatest strength. PHANTOM OF THE AFTERS is frequently hilarious while maintaining a grounded and earnest sentiment. Instead, the jokes make the darker moments more believable. Depression, grief and loneliness rarely announce themselves with cinematic seriousness in real life. Sometimes they appear in the middle of a stupid conversation, a night out or a story somebody is telling because they don't want to talk about what is actually bothering them.

By the time the title track arrives, Jackie Dandelion feels less like a character and more like armour that has gradually stopped working. The performance begins to collapse. The bravado that made the beginning of the record so exciting becomes exhausting, and the album's ghosts become clearer: relationships that never became what they might have been, the fear of wasting your life, the guilt attached to leaving, and grief that cannot be escaped simply by changing cities.

Then comes ‘HEAVEN SHOULDN’T HAVE YOU’.

It is an extraordinary ending because the album finally stops running. There is no character left to hide behind and almost none of the wit that normally allows Kojaque to redirect attention. The grief surrounding his father has appeared throughout his music, but here it feels devastatingly direct. After an album spent moving between Dublin and London, confidence and anxiety, comedy and sadness, the final track reduces everything to absence. It changes the record that came before it. Jackie’s constant movement begins to feel less like ambition and more like someone trying to stay ahead of things that cannot actually be outrun; the bare-bones instrumental and blunt lyrics are the perfect end to this album.

The reason PHANTOM OF THE AFTERS lands so close to perfection is not that every song is individually flawless. There are moments in its middle stretch where its ideas overlap, and trimming a small amount could arguably make the album more immediate. But doing so might also damage what makes it special. The sprawl feels appropriate, symbolic of the late-night afters the LP is named after; it’s symbolic of the arc of a typical night out involving highs and lows. At 15 tracks, the album feels less like a playlist of Kojaque songs than an actual place. You enter it through Dublin Airport, spend its runtime wandering through London beside somebody who is trying to decide whom he has become, and leave with the uncomfortable sense that he still does not completely know.

That uncertainty is exactly why the album works.

Kojaque does not arrive at some clean conclusion about Ireland, emigration, masculinity, love or grief. Instead, PHANTOM OF THE AFTERS captures the period where all of those things are tangled together, when home is somewhere you wanted to escape until you left it, success is something you desperately wanted until you began getting it, and adulthood mostly means discovering that the people you thought had everything figured out were improvising too. It is funny, uncomfortable, deeply specific and somehow enormous, and it sprawls all forms of relatability. Most importantly, it could not have come from anywhere else but home.