New Music: GoGo Penguin & Daudi Matsiko, “Forgive the Damages”

GoGo Penguin’s new record, Necessary Fictions, will finally be released on June 20th. Hailing from Manchester, England, GoGo Penguin nearly broke up after their prior record, Everything Is Going to Be Okay, released in 2023. The band was dealing with a host of different traumas. Everything from the death of family members and the concomitant grief, to the Covid-19 pandemic, something that changed the entire world.

Working through all of this in the studio is what allowed GoGo Penguin to cope and produce an exciting new body of work, one that feels fully their own. Nick Blacka, bass and synth player, notes this progression.

“This is what we want to make right now, and it feels authentic.”

For the first time, GoGo Penguin have enlisted a vocalist, further expanding their sound.

The man chosen for this project is a good friend of the band; Daudi Matsiko, a British-Ugandan singer/songwriter. Matsiko has been an adjacent part of GoGo Penguin throughout the years, opening for them on many tours. It’s this familiarity and trust that led the band to branch out on “Forgive the Damages,” inviting Matsiko further into their world.

What emerged from this collaboration is a song that evokes quiet power and self-reflection. With soft, layered vocals, anchored by piano and synth, “Forgive the Damages” feels as if a wave is washing over the listener. This track will prompt the listener to consider grander ideas and more complex meanderings of a mind. It’s a song that facilitates questions, leaving the listener to provide their own answers.

Blacka expands,

“‘We’ve often thought about working with other musicians, particularly vocalists, but it had to feel right and not forced. We’ve been friends with Daudi Matsiko for a long while now and over the years we’ve talked about writing something together. Originally, we weren’t thinking of having vocals on this track. We had the chords and the melodic idea, but we were thinking of using field recordings, samples or perhaps even some spoken word. One weekend around the time we were working on this track Daudi randomly phoned as he’d flown into Manchester from a gig in Slovakia. I went to pick him up from the airport and we sat in my garden and drank some beers. This is when I explained some of the overall concepts behind the album and he went away and wrote some lyrics. He completely understood where we were coming from with this album. Everything clicked into place, it didn’t feel forced, and it definitely felt right. We tweaked a few things together and we asked for a “soaring vocal line” at the end of the track and Daudi recorded the harmonised line that sings “forgive the damages” near the end of the song, which is when we really felt we had something special.’”

Make sure to check out Necessary Fictions, out June 20th.

Listen to “Forgive the Damages” and check out their YouTube performance below!