Son Little plays Brighton on back of new album

Son is often placed in the category of roots musician, but, as he says, there is more to it than that: “The industry likes to keep artists in little boxes, and for Black artists it has meant being defined by your proximity to urban. But my music has always had flashes of country, rock and folk, as well as hip-hop, blues and R&B. So I've always struggled as an artist who kind of, I think, lives in the spaces between genres.

Now living outside of Atlanta, Son attributes the development of Cityfolk to going even further south to record in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in January 2025. It was there that he connected with Ben Tanner, a two-time Grammy-winning musician, Alabama Shakes band member and producer of St Paul & The Broken Bones, John Paul White, Foy Vance and more, to flesh out sketches of songs that he’d crafted through what he calls epiphanies about his family’s roots. Already having an understanding of his father’s side, he views his maternal line as a “mystery unfolding,” but it was in Shoals that the stars aligned, both through retracing his history and formulating an organic chemistry with Tanner.

But it wasn’t an intentional journey: Son was guided by water through the misfortune of pipes bursting in the basement of his Atlanta residence. The space flooded several times, and at one point, it occurred just as wildfires were raging in Los Angeles.

“Just by showing up it brought something out,” Little explains. “I realised, in moving here, that my mother's people all came from this area, from South Carolina, Georgia. I thought a lot about how interesting it was that I would just sort of gravitate and migrate to a place where I had history. Sometimes the spirits will guide you to a place when you don't even know you don't know why you found yourself there.”