Kay Slice Taking Highlife Somewhere New
- Stevie Connor
- 1 hour ago
- 5 min read
By Stevie Connor | The Sound Cafe Journal
There are some records that look backwards to understand where they came from. And then there are records that understand the past is only useful if you are prepared to take it somewhere new.
Kay Slice’s - I Take U Highlife belongs firmly in the second category.
Due September 25, 2026, through Agogo Records, the album is rooted in Ghanaian highlife, but it is not an exercise in nostalgia. It is a record about movement, between countries, generations, musical traditions and identities. Born in the Netherlands to Ghanaian parents, Kay Slice grew up with the sound of his heritage around him while also absorbing the hip-hop culture that shaped his generation. His music sits naturally in that space between inherited tradition and lived experience.
That makes I Take U Highlife more interesting than a straightforward celebration of a musical genre. It is an attempt to understand what happens when music travels with people.
Highlife has always been a music of movement and exchange. Its history is filled with changing influences, instruments, languages and social circumstances. It has never been completely static, and perhaps that is part of the reason it has remained relevant. Kay Slice understands that instinctively. His approach brings the rhythmic foundations of highlife into conversation with hip-hop, Afrobeat, jazz, soul and contemporary production, without treating those influences as separate compartments.
The result is music that feels connected to where it came from while refusing to remain there.
Kay’s own journey is central to that process. Returning to Ghana and spending time immersed in the culture gave him an opportunity to move beyond simply inheriting the music. He began to understand the structures beneath it, the rhythms, the call-and-response traditions, the relationship between musicians and the audience, and the importance of language and storytelling. He also learned Ghanaian xylophone, deepening that connection to the musical vocabulary that had been part of his background long before he began reshaping it through his own work.
There is a difference between borrowing from a tradition and understanding enough about it to contribute something of your own.
I Take U Highlife appears to be concerned with the latter.
The album’s track list tells part of that story. There are twelve tracks, including collaborations with figures from different generations and different corners of the contemporary Ghanaian and African diaspora music scene. Gyedu-Blay Ambolley appears on Adwuma, Pat Thomas on Kwame Nkrumah, while Jembaa Groove, MiDi KwaKwa and RnB Princess are among the other collaborators. The album therefore becomes something of a musical conversation rather than simply a solo statement.
That conversation is particularly evident on Adwuma.
The word means “work” in Twi, and the track brings Kay together with highlife veteran Gyedu-Blay Ambolley. There is something appropriate about an album concerned with heritage and the future bringing two generations together. The track carries the rhythmic confidence of highlife while Kay’s delivery introduces a more contemporary cadence. Rather than presenting the older and newer approaches as competing ideas, the two sit comfortably alongside each other.
It is not a museum piece.
It is a living conversation.
That same idea continues into Kwame Nkrumah, where Kay works with another Ghanaian legend, Pat Thomas. The subject reaches beyond music into history, Pan-Africanism and the legacy of one of the continent’s most significant political figures. Thomas brings the authority of experience, while Kay approaches the subject from the perspective of another generation. The collaboration becomes another example of how history can be carried forward rather than simply remembered.
Then there is Sauce n Stew, which perhaps provides the album with its most direct emotional centre.
The song addresses systemic racism in Europe and the experience of being told, in effect, that you do not belong. For someone whose life has been lived between Europe and Ghana, that question of belonging is not theoretical. It is personal. The irony is that being told to return to where he came from ultimately became part of Kay’s journey towards understanding where he came from.
That gives the song a weight that goes beyond protest.
It becomes a question of identity.
Kay also reaches backwards through history, referencing figures including Marcus Garvey, Yaa Asantewaa and Patrice Lumumba. Those names place the personal experience of migration, racism and identity within a much larger story of African resistance, independence and self-determination.
And yet the music does not become weighed down by the subject matter.
That is one of highlife’s great strengths.
The rhythm keeps moving.
UNESCO’s description of highlife points to its lively rhythms, storytelling, connection to everyday life, use of guitars, horns, drums, xylophones and percussion, and its tradition of call-and-response. In 2025, UNESCO inscribed Highlife music and dance from Ghana on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. The recognition is significant because it acknowledges highlife not simply as a musical style, but as a living cultural practice connected to identity, community and social expression.
Kay Slice’s work sits naturally within that continuing evolution.
Tracks such as Take Time, Doremi, A-Way, Got U Up and The Source expand the album’s musical palette, while the inclusion of collaborators from different backgrounds reinforces the sense that highlife is not something with a fixed border around it. The music can absorb new rhythms, technologies and voices while retaining the characteristics that make it recognisable.
That is where the album becomes more than a genre exercise.
It becomes a record about cultural inheritance.
What do you do with something that was handed down to you?
You can preserve it exactly as it was.
You can reject it.
Or you can learn it well enough to carry it somewhere it has never been before.
Kay Slice appears to have chosen the third option.
That may explain why the hip-hop influence feels important rather than incidental. Hip-hop is another musical language built around identity, storytelling, social observation and the experience of finding a voice within circumstances that do not always make that easy. Kay grew up listening to artists such as Nas and Busta Rhymes, and those influences became part of his own vocabulary. They did not replace his Ghanaian heritage. They became another part of it.
That is what diaspora can do to music.
It complicates it.
It adds layers.
It creates something that could not have existed in quite the same form anywhere else.
I Take U Highlife is therefore not simply about Ghana, the Netherlands or Africa. It is about what happens in the space between them.
It is about the child of one culture growing up inside another, then returning to the first and discovering that it is both familiar and new. It is about realising that heritage is not something you simply possess. It is something you have to understand, question and eventually contribute to.
And that may be the most compelling thing about Kay Slice’s album.
He is not trying to prove that he belongs to highlife.
He is showing what highlife can become when it continues to travel.
Highlife has already crossed generations, borders and oceans. It has remained alive because musicians have continued to make it relevant to the lives they are living now. Kay Slice is adding another chapter to that story, bringing together the sound of Ghana with the experiences of the diaspora and the musical influences that shaped him along the way.
That is not looking backwards.
That is carrying something forward.
And perhaps the most exciting thing about I Take U Highlife is that it does not sound like the end of that journey.
It sounds like another beginning.
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