Harry Birch wrote “Don’t Give Up” while he was drinking himself under and his mother was dying of bone cancer. “This song saved me,” he says. He wrote it for her. The music pulls against all that: warm bass, guitar ringing bright over it, the tempo unhurried. Only the first line gives it away, Birch calling himself “a whiskey walking junkie”.
Halfway through the song, he hands a verse to Lunda, a French-Congolese singer working in soul and indie rock. The chorus asks for time to put a broken life back together: “Please don’t give up on me / ‘Cause oh on our love we can revive / the pieces of our life…”
Birch is Kaya Street, the Bristol project he writes, sings and produces. He formed it in 2014 as a ten-piece soul band, broke it up in early 2024 to get into the studio properly, then rebuilt it at the end of that year around live horns, drums and electronics. Juno-winning Toronto producer Dubmatix is producing the next Kaya Street album. “Don’t Give Up” stands apart from the afrobeat he usually works in, and from the political songs that come with it.