Chino Amobi

Thanks for speaking with me. Yes, the genre-bending is still present, but unlike previous projects, this album is much more formalised and grounded by trap drums and loops. There are many elements it ventures through. This has been influenced heavily by my time living in Houston: the sounds, visuals, and experience of driving around its gridded, concrete, drone-like bayous. For me, trap is in sync with the rhythm and flow of moving through the city. The various genres accompanying the drums function like postmodern architecture, as demographics shift subtly through the zone-free districts of this flat, sprawling metropolis.

When I turned thirty, it felt like the right time to present myself in my work beyond the alter ego, as a way of unifying the disparate mediums I move through. The veil, in a way, is in the unveiling.

For sure. Airport Music was far more internal than Paradiso. It reflected my psychic headspace at the time. I was in Berlin in the middle of winter, barely going outside, and that isolation created the perfect dissociative conditions to write. It was more introspective, while Paradiso was very extroverted. Eroica II is more meditative, spatially luxurious, and cerebral, yet it’s also lived, physical, and alchemical. It’s present, intimate, and less dissociative. I’m rapping and singing succinctly about concrete topics, yet it still carries the mythical quality of Paradiso. In that earlier era, people were so open to collaboration. There was real mutual energy; everything felt fluid. Paradiso captured that. If Paradiso was the director’s cut, Eroica II is more about my personal philosophy and worldview and less about the collective state of things.

For me, these worlds have always been about the world at large. The world of Eroica II is the real world we live in. If Paradiso is a film you watch on screen, Eroica II is the film swirling around you in the quotidian, grotesque, magic-realist sense.

Minimalism and abstraction cut to the core of emotional urgency—they strip away fluff and inessentials with clinical precision. There’s a history of this in Houston, both visually and sonically. It does away with over-conceptualising. Minimalism is at the marrow, the desert of symbolic life where mystics get closer to the realisation of their souls.

It’s an album about containing contradictions, within myself and within the world. One minute I’m talking about the Hand of God; the next I’m talking about stripper poles in the Galleria. Eroica II is about the alchemical resolution of opposites and how that occurs internally and manifests externally, where light is experienced through darkness. I’ve written about this in my novel Eroica. It connects to the apophatic tradition of approaching the numinous, something I identify with deeply. Many of the titles are influenced by my love of Russian and Eastern European artists, musicians, and filmmakers. They have an enigmatic yet sincere grasp of merging dualities.

When I made Paradiso, I was travelling to a different country almost every other week, so those collaborations reflected a constant state of global transit. Eroica II is more internal and domestic, yet influenced by my travels to over fifty countries. It synthesises those experiences into a focused point, grounded in Houston and a few other American cities. The only vocal collaboration is with my blood brother, Chichi the Eternal. Otherwise, it’s much more solitary. It’s my own voice you hear throughout, more than on any other album I’ve made.

I honestly have no idea, and I can’t apologise for any of it, nor do I care much how it’s perceived. It will reach whoever it needs to reach, how it needs to reach them. For those who have ears to hear. I can see it alienating some of the Paradiso or Airport Music listeners, while bringing new ones closer—especially those drawn to rap and artistic evolution. This album is more yin than Paradiso’s yang. It’s cooler, darker, and more sensual, more vulnerable, which takes great strength and courage.

Both are happening simultaneously. That is Eroica: it’s psychic, Janus-faced—present and future unfolding at once, each shaping the other. There is one, and two, and then the third, the numinous composition that reveals itself in many mediums, in many times and places, to those attuned to it.

They reify themselves by being grounded yet zoneless; the synthesis of contradictions I mentioned. The documented Christian tradition and the dark, unwritten history of my ancestors. The light of heaven and the chthonic void of the underworld. Coming down from heaven and rising up from hell. North and South, East and West, it’s all there, dancing in a single point. My provenance opened me to these pluralisms. Houston is a postmodern city. My friend Barrett Avner and I have spoken about Christian postmodernism as a positive. I exercise those ideas on the album.

Those were very free, fast songs. I didn’t overthink them. There’s a rawness that connects back to the urgency of my Diamond Black Hearted Boy era. They’re about the music itself, not some vast narrative; they just came out of me, the living soundtrack of my life. Like Leonard Cohen said about poetry: it’s the embers floating from the ash of a fully lived life. That byproduct naturally flowed into the creation of Eroica II, which is about a fully lived experience.

If Paradiso was James Joyce—modernist, maximal, knowing everything and saying everything—then Eroica II is Samuel Beckett: knowing and saying nothing, but through the mouth of someone who knows everything. It’s more subtractive than additive. When I was younger, I wanted to include everything in my art. As I’ve grown older, I’ve become more confident in saying less. Simplicity is purer and braver. It takes courage and humility to be simple.

God is with you and will not forsake you. Humanity still exists. So who is willing to sing if love is worth the wait?