Ezra Collective are here because of hope

Wandering through Tileyard London, the King’s Cross hub for independent music artists, I eventually find Ezra Collective tucked inside one of the complex’s sprawling studios. The entrance opens into a kitchen area, where I co-opt a teensy space to interview most of the boys – five of Britain’s most decorated jazz musicians – one-on-one. They emerge from a cavernous shoot room, located behind the crawling plants and stone-frozen figures in the front. In there, gargantuan speakers loom against a paper backdrop beneath huge studio lights, while opposite them a grooming station glows with rows of bulbs like something borrowed from a Hollywood dressing room. Motorbikes are parked in one corner. Upstairs, on a little raised platform, there’s a Street Fighter arcade machine, ready for whoever gets bored between takes. This is how stars are accommodated for, because Ezra Collective, now one of Britain’s biggest bands, are exactly that. 

Except the five men wandering in and out of this glorious little den don’t seem particularly interested in behaving like superstars. With the exception of Ife Ogunjobi, who replaced Dylan Jones as trumpeter in 2019, Femi Koleoso, his brother TJ, Joe Armon-Jones and James Mollison have spent more than a decade becoming one of Britain’s most celebrated bands, but there is still something unmistakably matey and casual about the way they occupy a room together. They joke, disappear to get food, talk music and drift between the studio and the tiny kitchen as though this is simply another extension of the places where they have long made music together. The surroundings may be built for superstars, but Ezra Collective, now largely in their early thirties, still feel like a bunch of friends who got very good at jamming.

That becomes increasingly striking when you consider just how much has happened since they formed in London in 2012. The band grew through youth clubs, churches, small venues and the city’s sprawling musical ecosystem before releasing their debut EP Chapter 7 in 2016. Since then, Where I’m Meant to Be became the first jazz album to win the Mercury Prize in 2023. Then, Dance, No One’s Watching reached number seven in the UK albums chart, carried the band to Wembley Arena and was followed by a BRIT Award for Group of the Year in 2025. Yet when you ask them what all of it means, they rarely sound particularly interested in the trophies. “The accolades and stuff is cool,” says Joe, “but I think that’s all come with the desire to make good music.” If the prizes had never arrived, he says, they would still be making music “in some capacity”. He still checks out artists with around 20,000 Spotify streams and thinks, ‘Yo, this is sick.’ “Whether they get the credit for it or not, it’s a piece of art and should be treated with respect,” he says. For a band whose story is increasingly told through its milestones, there is something revealing about hearing Joe bring their whole story back to its essence: the music.

Ezra Collective’s impulse to make music existed long before anyone knew where it might take them. The first five members met through Tomorrow’s Warriors, the youth organisation that gave young musicians a place to learn, practise and play alongside one another. James remembers it as a weekly checkpoint with things to listen to, goals to work towards and skills to practise before returning the following week. But it was also somewhere to meet friends and discover a wider musical community. “It was really formative,” he says.

TJ remembers something even more fundamental: belief. “Being at Tomorrow’s Warriors and having people pour knowledge, wisdom and, yeah, guidance into you makes you confident and makes you step out,” he says. The first time he was asked to solo, he was so terrified he nearly fainted; eventually he played two notes before the session leader praised him for playing exactly what he felt. Around them was a whole ecosystem of young musicians playing in one another’s projects: Femi with Nubya Garcia and a wider community producing bands and collaborations. It wasn’t a direct route towards success; they simply had somewhere to go, people to learn from and friends to keep making music with.

Joe thinks of the band’s albums in much the same way. “I just look at albums like diary entries really,” he tells me. “I just look at them as a record of where we all are at that time.” They are markers of different stages of his musical life, made for him to look back on when he’s older. The point is simple: “to make music with friends and keep chronicling it, really”. After years together, the Ezra Collective’s catalogue has consequently become a record of five lives moving forwards alongside one another. That makes their fourth album, Here Because of Hope, a particularly personal entry. It captures a point in their lives when hope has become more complicated. They have families, responsibilities, losses and disappointments behind them now, and enough experience to know that a setback can change shape with time. The album turns that adult perspective into its most deliberate concept yet: an exploration of joy emerging from pain and despair, played out across three movements. It isn’t simply another snapshot of where Ezra are musically; it is a record of what they now understand about the events and circumstances that have carried them there.

For TJ, growing older has changed what hope means because it has given him evidence. “I think hope has more evidence as you grow up,” he tells me. When you’re young, you can hope for presents at Christmas or that school will be fun; as you get older, experience gives you “more reason to believe or less reason to believe”. His own experience has made him more convinced that things can work out for good, even when the meaning isn’t immediately visible. Grief has been part of that education too: in the immediate aftermath of losing someone, despair can feel impossible to articulate, but time can eventually transform a person’s memory into something beautiful. “So, as I’ve got older, I’ve had more evidence to subscribe to the idea of hope,” says TJ. That belief had been tested shortly before they made the record. TJ describes 2024 as a year marked by losses and opportunities that seemed within reach before disappearing “like sand through your fingers”. Though TJ doesn’t elaborate on the nature of the grief, his brother Femi has previously discussed the tragic murder that year of Daniel Anjorin, a 14-year-old member of Jubilee Youth, a youth group of which both brothers are leading organisers.

Those moments forced him to question whether what they were doing was worth it at all. The answer became central to the album: “hope is the thing that gets you to a positive answer out of those necessary questions.” For TJ, hope is “the belief that as time goes on, the current predicament can get better or mean something.”

The idea became bigger than their own lives when Ezra Collective started asking why so much Black music can emerge from devastating circumstances and still make people move. Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, calypso, reggae and Caribbean sounds, the grime and UK music that surrounded them: again and again, pain and celebration coexist. Femi describes an obsession with “how many Black genres where the story is painful, but the result is this dance-floor feeling”. Their answer was the title itself: “And we came up with hope.” Here Because of Hope follows that idea geographically, travelling from Africa through the Caribbean and towards the UK. The journey mirrors Ezra’s own histories: Nigerian heritage, Jamaican roots and the musical collision of growing up in London. Divided into three sections or movements, the album’s first part celebrates African sounds and traditions. The second, Caribbean section moves through the music of the diaspora before the final part reaches Britain, where all those influences collide with the sounds Ezra grew up hearing.

“We explore these sounds, but we’re all linked by London, which in itself is a feeling and a culture,” says Ife. Rather than treating these places as stops on a musical sightseeing tour, the record traces routes that already run through Ezra Collective’s own lives – sounds carried across borders, absorbed in London and eventually transformed into something that belongs to them.

The collaborators help give each section its own voice. TJ says the band wanted the features to “help solidify each movement of the album”: Pa Salieu’s Gambian identity and musicality anchor the African section, while Lila Iké strengthens its Caribbean world. Leona Lewis brings the journey into Britain, while Cameroonian singer Libianca connects the album’s different worlds, helping turn its movement across continents into something more human than a musical history lesson.

For James, that journey is personal enough to fit inside the title itself. His father grew up in Jamaica before leaving for Britain in pursuit of a better future for his children. When James thinks about Here Because of Hope, he thinks about the decisions made by the generation before him. “I’m here because they hoped,” he says. His own existence and career are evidence that somebody else’s belief in a different future became real. Femi hears that inheritance in the music too. “I may not be a part of the funky house or broken beats story,” he says, “but I’m the offspring of it.” The album can therefore move across continents without ever losing its most important location: the London that made these five musicians.

Joe sees that collision as intrinsic to jazz itself. “The music [on the album] is already the makeup of jazz in the first place,” he says. It is the combination of sounds from different parts of the world coming together, “so it kind of comes back around”. What looks from the outside like Ezra suddenly expanding into new territory therefore feels to them more like a return to the foundation of their sound: different histories meeting, being absorbed and becoming something new. But the record isn’t only interested in where these sounds came from; Ezra are thinking about where they can take somebody. TJ says they were trying to make joy from pain at every level, asking themselves where they wanted a listener to arrive emotionally and which musical tools could get them there. That is where Here Because of Hope differs from simply making music that sounds joyful: the joy is a destination. The band are interested in the journey from one emotional state to another, in how harmony, rhythm and melody can help somebody move through whatever they are carrying. The result is an album that can make you dance without asking you to pretend everything is fine.

That usefulness is part of what makes music matter to Ife. He remembers once thinking creative work wasn’t a “proper job” compared with conventional professions but now sees art and culture as something people rely on to navigate their lives. A song, poem, play or film can pull someone through a difficult moment. “We’ve been given this gift,” he says, “that with our music that we’re able to tap into people’s lives like this.” And now they want to share that gift. The Ezra Collective Foundation is already putting the principle into practice, creating routes into behind-the-scenes music roles for young Black women through training, mentoring and hands-on experience. It takes the same idea that shaped Ezra’s beginnings – that access, guidance and somebody willing to pour into you can change the course of a life – and makes it tangible for somebody else. For a band whose own story was built through people making space for them, the foundation feels less like an extra project than an extension of the way they understand music itself: something that becomes more meaningful when it is shared.

It means that the band have the busiest of schedules, but Femi explains that his friendship with the late, great Virgil Abloh was one of the reasons why such a mindset was instilled.

“I’d speak to him and think bro, you’re doing too much. One second you’re doing a radio set and the next you’re DJing and then you’re doing something with LV [Louis Vuitton],” Femi tells us separately for the first episode of ‘The Listening Room’, presented with Bowers & Wilkins video podcast – a new series that takes a deep dive into the story behind the music of an artist’s greatest works.

“I used to think he was doing way too much and take a break, but then of course he passed away [from cancer] and I had no idea what he was going through or that he was ill. That became such a moment for me, because I realised that tomorrow is not promised. Suddenly, all of the things he achieved, I looked at it and thought how incredible is that? He got so much done and now I’m always like if I’ve got just five percent battery in me, and I think it will be soulful and beautiful and make for something wonderful, then I’ll go for it.”

That sense of responsibility is inseparable from the band’s collective identity. James learned through Ezra to “zoom out” and recognise that he is only one part of something larger; their success depends on knowing when to step forward, when to listen and when to let someone else carry the moment.

TJ remembers those early years clearly: “We were surrounded by people that are constantly championing us. And I think that’s why we’re here today.” Then comes the responsibility: “It’s our job to do the same for people that are younger than us.” They didn’t create a master plan for world domination with deliberate goals to collect Mercury Prizes, BRIT Awards, or headline Wembley. Their careers may now look extraordinary from the outside, but to Ezra it is also evidence of what happens when people pour enough belief, time and care into young artists and let them grow into something they couldn’t yet imagine.

Fourteen years later, they’re finding ways to hand that belief over. Ife hopes their story can make another young person think, “these guys can do it, and they did it in their way, then I can do it in my own way”. That might be the most exciting thing Ezra Collective can leave behind: not a blueprint for becoming them, but proof that you can find your own way too. The superstars in that Tileyard studio are, ultimately, still those five friends who got very good at jamming. Only now they have a bigger room, a bigger audience and the chance to make somebody else feel that same little jolt of possibility they once felt themselves. They know what it feels like to be carried by hope. Now they’re finding new ways to carry it forward – through their music, through the doors they open and through the people they choose to pour into next.

Taken from the October/November issue of Rolling Stone UK. Pre-order it here.