FUDGE has its date as Kiwanuka fights back to health

Cut with his live band in Southampton, the Polydor release was finished before his stroke. He remains in a Hampshire centre and still cannot say when he will tour.

Michael Kiwanuka has set October 2026 as the release date for FUDGE, his fifth studio album, and has spoken more fully about the haemorrhagic stroke he suffered in late July 2025 and the rehabilitation still under way.

The London singer-songwriter posted the announcement on Instagram on 23 September. He disclosed that a brain haemorrhage, brought on by high blood pressure, had left him with a brain injury he described as quite severe. After months in intensive care, hospital wards and a rehabilitation centre in Hampshire, he faces what he called a long, tough journey of recovery, with no certainty yet over when or in what form he will return to the road. He thanked NHS staff, medical professionals, family and friends for their support through that period. It has been one of the toughest challenges he has faced, he wrote, but he is fighting to get better and feels he is on his way.

A few days later, he gave a telephone interview from the Hampshire centre alongside his wife, Charlotte Kiwanuka, confirming the timing of the stroke as after his European dates. The health issues had already forced him to pull out of recent US gigs and earlier festival dates, among them All Together Now in County Waterford. No further touring dates have been confirmed.

An album finished in Southampton

FUDGE arrives on Polydor Records, the label that has released his work since the start. It was recorded with his live band in Southampton and marks his first production credit since his 2012 debut, Home Again. That first record went gold in the United Kingdom and followed his win as the BBC's Sound of 2012. Love & Hate reached number one in 2016. KIWANUKA appeared in 2019, and in September 2020 he took the Mercury Prize. Small Changes followed in 2024. The new album is his fifth full-length, part of a catalogue built steadily over more than a decade, and it reaches listeners while its maker is still rebuilding strength away from the stage.

The decision to cut the record with the touring band, and to take a production role himself for the first time since the debut, keeps the focus on the songs and the room rather than on a long silence. For an artist whose writing has always sat at the centre of the work — from the intimate frame of Home Again through the wider arrangements of Love & Hate and the Mercury-winning KIWANUKA — finishing FUDGE before the stroke's full consequences were clear is part of the continuity he is fighting to hold. The run from a gold debut to a UK number one, Mercury recognition and a 2024 album left little idle time; the fifth set keeps that pace on record even as the live diary stops.

What remains open

At 39, Kiwanuka has already collected the Mercury Prize, a UK number one, gold certification on the debut and a run of Brit, MTV and Grammy nominations. What the stroke changes is the immediate live picture. The missed American dates and the Waterford festival appearance are the visible cost so far. The album is locked and dated; the return to gigs is not. He has said plainly that the form and timing of any comeback remain uncertain while rehabilitation continues.

Listeners who have had the records in heavy rotation will hear FUDGE first as a studio statement — the same voice and craft, now carrying a production credit that reaches back to the first album. Whether and how the songs reach Irish and British stages after that is the question he cannot yet answer. For now the date that matters is October, when the fifth album lands, and the work of getting better goes on in Hampshire.