There is a long history of artists crossing the Irish Sea to seek their fortune. The difference with Kevin Smith, aka Kojaque, is that the Dubliner was already a star before he left for Britain during the pandemic.
“But I’ve never felt more Irish than I felt when I moved over here. I felt, like, positively f**king Fenian,” he says, laughing over a Zoom call from his home in London. People in England “just wouldn’t know their history, it seems – certainly not the history that we’re taught. So you just encounter a lot of ignorance, and it can get you kind of f**king angry sometimes. Other times you just feel bad for a lot of people.”
He sighs. “I think there can be a real loneliness to London, and I think that’s where some of the songs on this album came from. But it feels like there’s a lot of opportunity – and that can inspire you as well.”
Smith had released two excellent records before he left his hometown. His 2018 mixtape Deli Daydreams, a concept record about a week in the life of a deli worker in Dublin, and Town’s Dead, his 2021 debut proper, were both nominated for the Choice Music Prize. His third is another exceptional leap forward from the often-scathing overview of Irish society that informed its predecessor. Phantom of the Afters encompasses love, grief, depression, heritage and new beginnings via his unique lens – which has been brought into sharper focus since moving away from Dublin.
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We had sex maybe once a month. The constant rejection was soul-crushing, it felt like my ex didn’t even like me
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“I enjoy the anonymity,” he says. “Nobody knows me here, and I really enjoy that. I think a lot of my work is observation-based; it’s about people-watching. If you’re worried about people recognising you or walking around in Dublin and getting stopped, it can really impede your writing. Change is always good – and change is where a lot of growth comes from.” He shrugs. “So it was a case of just wanting a new challenge and feeling that I’d done everything that I could do in Dublin.”
Both the album’s cover art and the video for Cabra Drive, his recent single, incorporate Jackie Dandelion, Kojaque’s alter ego of sorts. In the video he wanders around Dalymount Park football stadium and the streets of his native Cabra and lurks on corners in the Liberties wearing prosthetics and gold teeth, looking every inch the grizzled, wheeler-dealer furniture salesman. Smith conceived the character, who is waggishly introduced to us as “taking the soup” in the album’s opening scene-setting interlude, as a framing device for the album.
“I think there’s a certain thing, particularly if you move over to Britain, and London in particular, of feeling like you stand out like a sore thumb,” Smith says. “You know that big-Irish-head-on-you feeling. Or people laughing at you just for the way you talk. I’ve had that a lot. I’ll be speaking sentences normally, and people will be taking the mick out of the accent, or doing the accent back to you while you’re having a conversation.
“It can be kind of alienating in that sense, and I think that might be a part of where the character comes from. It’s a projection of how that makes you feel, like a caricature of an Irish person. And another part of it is that, when I’m writing, I like to create little worlds. Music has always been an escape for me, so a character is quite important to me on an album.”
He admits that this album isn’t as conceptual as his previous work. “It’s a bit more letting the songs do the work and the storytelling,” he says. “But I like framing stuff so that each piece, each album, is self-contained. It’s its own little world that you kind of fall into.”
Jackie Dandelion, he concedes with a chuckle, is a reference to the Fontaines DC song Jackie Down the Line; he is friends with the band, who also live in London. “It started out as a joke, and it kind of got out of hand,” he says, laughing. “But the chorus of that song, a lot of those feelings resonate throughout this album, funnily enough. But, yeah, it is a reference. It’s in the same world, like a metaverse.” He grins. “I mean, I’ve never said it to them ... but they know.”
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As expansive as the perspective on Phantom of the Afters can be, it is also Kojaque’s most intimate, personal album in many ways. “A lot of it is about heartbreak and relationships and trying to understand a new life, and how that relates to how you’ve been raised,” Smith says. “Life back home, and that past slipping away from you.”
Smith has referenced his personal life in his work before, of course. The tragedy of his father’s death by suicide when he was a child was reflected on songs such as the poignant No Hands. Here, he explores the legacy of losing a parent on songs like Fat Ronaldo, Wagyu and the touching Heaven Shouldn’t Have You, which distorts and samples To the Bone, a track by the rising Irish musician Sammy Copley, to stunning effect. Smith clearly has a talent for capturing evocative scenes from childhood without sounding mawkish or cliched.
“Heaven Shouldn’t Have You is the most personal on the album – and it’s one that I didn’t really expect to be on this record,” he explains. “It’s something that I wrote when we were illegally evicted from my last gaff here in London, because we had a cowboy landlord. I wasn’t sure whether to just go back to Dublin or stay in London; sh*t felt very volatile, and I was just in a really bad mental state. And from that you get very homesick, and you get very nostalgic, and the song just poured out of me. I didn’t think about it; I just wrote it and put it away somewhere, and didn’t show anyone for about six months.” He shrugs. “I thought it summed up a lot of feelings that I had about emigration and my own love for Ireland, but also my issues with it.”
The album is musically innovative, too, with an eclectic list of collaborators that includes the Irish R’n’B act Biig Piig, the Norwegian jazz singer Charlotte Dos Santos and the American rapper Wiki. The soundtrack veers from retro jazz and soul to contemporary hip hop; songs like Johnny McEnroe and Citizen Kane have a distinctly Kendrick Lamar-influenced bite.
Smith’s lyrical inventiveness remains a highlight, whether it is the bravado-inspired daydreaming of Larry Bird (“Used to have to fight promoters just to book the shows/ Now the only issue’s keeping money out me nose”) to the aforementioned alienation of being Irish in a foreign land (“These toffs don’t get my jargon/ Try open up and they look at me in the pub like someone farted/ Get torn up like a Tayto pack on a pub table, gone scarlet”).
It’s clear that Smith examines life through a cerebral lens: he is as likely to cite the influence of the author and physician Gabor Maté or the artist Barbara Kruger as he is any other musician. He is a product of his upbringing, he says, where his schoolteacher mother placed an emphasis on education and encouraged Smith and his four brothers (who are all musicians now) to play music as kids, “because she read somewhere that boys would be able to concentrate better if they learned music from a young age”.
Music, he says, was always an escape from his often gritty childhood, where school was “tumultuous”, addiction problems were rampant in the area, and the family home was repeatedly broken into. He studied fine art for four years and considered going into filmmaking before Deli Daydreams kicked open the door to the music industry. Sharing his innermost thoughts on record has never been an issue, he says.
“I do think I’m quite a private person, and it does take me a very long time to open up to people in general,” he says. “But music has always been a nice buffer for that. I’ve never found it difficult to be vulnerable in music. It’s the real-life stuff that I find more difficult.”
Nevertheless, there has been a notable shift in Kojaque during the making of this record. Smith has noticed it himself.
“A lot of the album, for me, was about shedding a mask, in a sense,” he says. “Whether you’re self-aware of it or not, once you’re in the public eye you kind of start to perform as yourself. And it becomes this strange mask that you’re wearing, and it can be very unconscious; you start to become really paranoid about how you’re being perceived, and asking yourself questions like ‘Is this something I would do?’ It’s kind of hard.
“So I think through the process of the record. A lot of it was just understanding how meaningless a lot of that sh*t is. I think a lot of the record was about trying to remove those masks, and how they can separate you from yourself, and just focus more on the important sh*t. So, yeah, just being all right with who you are as opposed to worrying about who you think you are.” He nods. “Just concentrating on liking yourself, really.”
Phantom of the Afters is released on Soft Boy Records on Friday, October 27th. Kojaque tours Ireland from November 9th to 18th, with gigs in Limerick, Kilkenny, Galway, Cork, Dublin and Belfast
