This one’s for you, ’80s world music heads! After sitting out the vast majority of the 2010s (lucky!), Senegalese music legends Touré Kunda are staging their return with their first album since 2008, titled Lambi Golo. It’s out May 25 through Shellshock.
Like all the best hiatus-ending comeback albums, Lambi Golo finds Touré Kunda going back to their roots, specifically in the Casamance region of Senegal. The songs on the album “have been cultivated over many years and recorded in ‘village studio’ conditions to preserve the essence of life and evoke the loss of values for confused generations.” The album itself is being characterized as an ambitious project that nonetheless continues on from the band’s pioneering legacy, “a musical thiéboudienne that is both energetic and tender…a vibrant mix of m’balax, casamancais rhythms, funk, pop rock, and reggae and an open invitation to dance, to dream, and to hope.” As an avid fan of both dancing and dreaming (I can take or leave the hoping), this record sounds suspiciously perfect!
But albums are a lot like M. Night Shyamalan movies: you aren’t sure what you’re gonna get until you see the trailer. So go ahead and check out a funk filled preview of Lambi Golo below before you go bravely attempting to navigate any foreign language pre-order websites — and check out the cover art and full tracklisting. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to get fluent in Soninké, Wolof, Fula, Mandingo, Diola, and Portuguese creole by the end of May…
Lambi Golo tracklisting:
01. Demaro ft. Manu Dibango
02. Oustache
03. Emma Salsa ft. Carlos Santana
04. Malang
05. Lambi Golo
06. Sene Bayo
07. Fatou Yow
08. Mister Farmer ft. Kiddus I
09. Ka Badiyassi
10. Soif de Liberte ft. Lokua Kanza
11. Deuk N Do
12. Sotolal
More about: Touré Kunda
