By Ed Enright | Published September 2025
British hip-hop-meets-jazz pioneer Geoff Wilkinson has released the first new music from Us3 in more than a decade — a highly personal, socially charged, cinematic hybrid of digitally generated trap beats and live musicianship. The 10th album from the outfit that scored a major hit in 1993 with “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia),” Soundtrack fascinates with threads of mysteriously catchy melody, grooves with a swing all its own and flows like a wind-instrument-blown tapestry of complex colors, textures and dynamics straight out of the vaunted chamber of Gil Evans’ large ensemble arrangements for Miles Davis and Henri Mancini’s vast oeuvre of spellbinding movie scores. With the goal of crafting a new set of all-instrumental tunes that convey maximum emotional intensity, Wilkinson enlisted keyboardist and long-term Us3 collaborator Mike Gorman to develop the horn parts — a lush 18-piece blend of flutes, clarinets, saxophones, Turkish zurna, saxophones, trumpets (open and muted), flugelhorns, French horn, trombones and tuba — in a manner that would embellish and develop the themes of each track. The bittersweet “Long Ride Home” is a prime example of how the album’s stylistic union works. Inspired by Wilkinson’s train journeys back to his hometown, the track captures both nostalgia and melancholy as it drifts between warmth and unease. “Resist The Rat Race,” a critique of corporate monotony and societal conformity, pulses with urgency and restlessness rooted in Wilkinson’s early experience as a disillusioned worker-bee in the city center of Leeds, England. The paranoid, shadowy “Footsteps In The Dark” conjures a foreboding, film noir-ish mood that will feel all too familiar to anyone who’s braved a late-night walk in the big city. Leadoff track “What Have We Done” challenges notions of human progress with hesitant, glitchy trap beats tucked beneath an orchestral top-line bearing a lovely melody (that brings to mind the beauty of Earth’s natural environment) and dark-contrast harmony (which reminds us of the messy aftermath of industrial ambition). With fresh ideas and a recharged creative vision, Wilkinson shows what Us3’s stated mission of fusing jazz and hip-hop can mean today, more than 30 years after the group’s initial ventures in sampling the Blue Note back catalog.
To watch the video for “Resist The Rat Race,” CLICK HERE.
To watch the video for “Footsteps In The Dark,” CLICK HERE.
