BLACK FONDU returns with a new chapter in his boundary-pushing sound with im not sleeping, a raw and urgent single accompanied by a self-made video, out now via Scenic Route. Written between his mum’s house in London and late nights in Paris, the track went through more than twenty versions before landing on its final form. There’s an immediate burst of emotion that captures the track’s central theme, confronting denial head-on, and the video mirrors that intensity, pairing lo-fi visuals with the unfiltered energy of one of London’s most vital new voices.
If genres were borders, BLACK FONDU would be the one tearing down the fences. His sound is a collision zone where hyperpop, grime, punk, noise, and rap all pile into the same lane, somehow avoiding a crash through sheer instinct. He’s as likely to draw from Rachmaninoff as MF Doom, with compositions born from subconscious freestyling and a self-taught ear. It’s messy in the way that truth often is: layers of chaos and intent, abrupt silences that hit as hard as the distortion. Born in Accra and now rooted in Peckham, Fondu works alone on every element: producing, writing, performing, and shaping the visual world that surrounds his music.
His live sets, word-of-mouth events at venues like The Windmill, have built a reputation for intensity, shared bills with acts like Shame and Special Interest only adding fuel to the fire. Now, with im not sleeping out via Scenic Route, FONDU takes that same unpredictability across the UK and Europe this summer. The dates stretch from Green Man Festival to Warsaw, but the approach stays the same: keep it urgent, keep it unpredictable, keep it real. In a landscape still chasing trends, BLACK FONDU feels like an entirely different proposition: one that refuses to fit, and is all the more vital for it.