Saul Williams - Leap Life

Williams was born on a leap day, which means he has had roughly a quarter as many birthdays as everyone else his age. Leap Life takes its name from that, and it is his first solo record in seven years, arriving on Big Dada, the label that housed his work in the early 2000s. He has described it as an attempt to commune with the dead against a backdrop of ongoing devastation in Palestine, Sudan, Haiti, Congo, and Yemen.

Carlos Niño, a friend since the late 1990s, shaped the arrangements and sequenced the whole thing as a single immersive front-to-back listen, and that intent is audible from the first minute. The record moves through electronic and ambient territory built from field recordings and environmental texture, pulling in jazz, hip-hop, and West African rhythmic traditions, with Williams using his voice as an instrument threaded through the music rather than perched on top of it. "Baobab Constellation" opens in near-abstraction. "Une Photographie" features Anisia Uzeyman, his longtime collaborator and co-director on Neptune Frost. "Robot Slave" and "Not Everything For Sale" are where the polemic sharpens to a point.

The guest list is remarkable and worth knowing before you drop the needle: Kamasi Washington, Moor Mother, Gonjasufi, Georgia Anne Muldrow, Surya Botofasina, and Robert Del Naja of Massive Attack all appear. Lead single "Conspiracy" pairs Williams with Moor Mother and Gonjasufi and gives a fair sense of the album's weight. It is the most sonically expansive thing he has made and still unmistakably a poet's record.

Double LP on black vinyl in a twelve inch gatefold with a twenty-four inch foldout newsprint poster. Out August 28, 2026 on Big Dada.