“There’s a lot of things I hate to feel, I know you know… Hate being kids, tried to be twenty one. Wait a minute, hate being twenty-one…” The kids are not alright, in fact they’re reeling in this ballad that finds them grappling with young adulthood, as they long to return to the childhood they couldn’t wait to escape. SuperJazzClub’s Back To Kids is a nostalgic trip drenched in the confusing melancholy often felt with the reality of growing up.

The Ghanaian Collective invoke child-like imagery as they sip and reminisce on the innocence of their juvenescence and the limitations they hated from that period whilst simultaneously being overwhelmed by the agency that being an adult now requires. This is done over an orchestral piece of progressive soul anchored by a really delicate and looming organ. The intimacy of the distorted instrumentation mixed with the repitched vocal processing gives Back To Kids a cinematic quality that feels like it could live within the same sonic universe as Frank Ocean’s classic Self Control and other gems from the generational Blonde. I have them in a playlist called Melancholic Beauty filled with larger-than-life delicate ballads that leave me in a longingly nostalgic mood; it’s great company for the moments where I want to weep whilst being comforted by dreamy music that feels fuzzy.

Back To Kids is heart-achingly beautiful. It swells you with melancholy from its vocals to production, strings to choired musings. It’s the type of song that leaves space for you to settle down and sit there with it for hours as you reminisce or just rest in its stillness. SuperJazzClub has been one of my favourite discoveries of 2022; their adventurous approach to music is exciting as well as affecting. Back To Kids affected me from the first listen and I really have yet to recover, this song is going to be with me for a while.

Read the full Top 22 of 2022 here.