Swings and Roundabouts

Some songs end an album by raising the stakes. Others end it by lowering the voice and letting the room go quiet. "Swings and Roundabouts" is the final track on Michael Kiwanuka's fifth album, FUDGE, and its job is closer to the second kind.^[6] It arrives after "Sing," the penultimate track, in a sequence that one reviewer described as reaching moments of almost unbelievable poignancy.^[1]

This essay is candid about its limits. The song is brand new, and at the time of writing no interview or track-by-track account explains it. What follows draws on the title, its place in the record, and the circumstances in which the album reached the public.

An idiom about balance

In British English, to say that something is swings and roundabouts is to say that gains and losses cancel out. You lose on the swings, you gain on the roundabouts, and the sum comes out about even. The phrase comes from the old fairground and playground logic of the thing: a bit of luck here, a bit of misfortune there, and no point keeping a precise tally.

It is a shrugging, working-class sort of expression, and it suits Kiwanuka. He grew up in Muswell Hill in north London, the son of Ugandan parents who had fled Idi Amin's regime.^[7] His music has long carried a plainspoken, even-tempered warmth, a voice that tends to absorb hardship rather than shout about it. A title like this one fits that temperament. It promises no grand verdict, only acceptance.

The position in the sequence

Where a song sits matters as much as what it says. FUDGE has twelve tracks, and this is the last.^[6] The record's mood, as reviewers describe it, is sun-soaked and reflective, a daydream in afternoon light with layered strings, cello and piano.^[3] Clash called the songwriting sombre and reflective, and found the album impeccably cohesive.^[1]

Ending on a phrase about balance is a quiet structural choice. After a record that moves between a trip-hop beat on "California," a stripped-back love song, and a long pensive piano outro,^[1][2] the closer sums up an outlook rather than adding another sound. Clash's reviewer named the closer as the place where he took away two impressions: how consistent Kiwanuka has been across his catalogue, and how cruel life can be.^[1]

A record made before the news

The context around this album is unusually heavy. In July 2025, Kiwanuka suffered a haemorrhagic stroke caused by undiagnosed high blood pressure.^[2] He has described a long, tough recovery, and a brain injury he called quite severe.^[4] Reports say that his speech and breathing were affected and that he has been retraining his vocal cords.^[2]

Crucially, FUDGE was broadly finished before any of this happened. The release was held back by almost a year.^[8] That timing creates a strange double exposure. NME noted that the lyrics are hard not to read in hindsight, since the record was made before all that.^[2] A song about the evenness of fortune, placed last, invites exactly that kind of retrospective reading, whether or not the writer intended it.

It is worth resisting the temptation to turn every line into a biography of the stroke. The songs were written by a person who did not yet know what was coming. What the stroke changes is the listener, not the text.

Playfulness as a creative stance

The album's title offers a clue to its spirit. Kiwanuka has said that the word fudge feels playful and childlike to him, which is good for creativity, and that it is also a polite way of saying he is just going to do it.^[4] That attitude runs through the project. He built a small studio near his Southampton home, and he produced the album himself for the first time since his debut, with Danger Mouse and Inflo stepping back.^[4][5]

There is a connection between that loose, hands-on way of working and the idiom in the closing title. Both express a willingness to stop calculating. The phrase counsels you not to over-audit the ledger of good and bad luck. The album's title counsels you to make the thing and trust your ear. Kiwanuka put the second idea into words himself: you have to work out what you think is beautiful, and trust it.^[8]

Where it sits in his catalogue

Kiwanuka's career has moved through distinct phases. Home Again in 2012 established him as a soul-folk singer in the tradition of Bill Withers and Otis Redding.^[7] Love & Hate in 2016 reached number one in the UK with Danger Mouse producing, and the 2019 album Kiwanuka won the Mercury Prize in 2020.^[7] Small Changes in 2024 turned toward a gentler, more intimate palette.^[7]

NME heard FUDGE as a continuation of Small Changes, with muted rumbling rhythm sections, warm guitar and grounding basslines.^[2] SPIN reached for a different set of touchstones: Rubber Soul, On the Beach, Blonde and Inspiration Information.^[4] A closer in this lineage would naturally be modest in scale, built on feel rather than spectacle.

A career built on doubt and persistence

Kiwanuka's story is not one of straight-line triumph. He played his first proper gig at twenty-two, supported Adele on tour in 2011, and topped the BBC Sound of 2012 poll soon after.^[7] Yet he scrapped an entire second album, Night Songs, after an A&R man discouraged him, and the record that replaced it became Love & Hate.^[7] The detour turned out well, which is itself a small piece of swings-and-roundabouts logic.

He has also spoken openly about anxiety and other mental health struggles.^[7] SPIN reports that FUDGE's song Stars began as he was emerging from a crisis of confidence after his debut, and that it still means a lot to him.^[4] The pattern is consistent: a writer who keeps returning to doubt and finding a way through it without much fuss.

The wider English habit of understatement

The idiom is also cultural shorthand. British speech has a long habit of meeting misfortune with understatement, with phrases that shrink a large feeling into a small, manageable one. To call a bad year swings and roundabouts is to refuse melodrama while still admitting that something happened.

Soul music, the tradition Kiwanuka most often draws on, tends to work the other way, pushing feeling outward until it cracks. His particular gift has been to hold both: the Britishness of the understatement and the soul singer's openness. A title like this one sits right at that meeting point.

Reading the closing slot in light of the album's themes

A final song on a delayed record also changes how an audience approaches it. Listeners who know the backstory will arrive at the end already thinking about resilience, recovery and the uncertain road ahead. Kiwanuka has said he is unsure when he will be back on the road,^[4] and Salon notes that no one knows when he will tour again.^[3] In that atmosphere, a closing track about the long balance of life feels less like an idle idiom and more like a deliberate parting handshake.

Other ways to hear it

One reading is consolatory. A song about things evening out can be a comfort, a way of saying that the bad stretch and the good stretch belong to the same life. For anyone following the news around the album, it is tempting to hear it as a message from someone making peace with a hard year.

A second reading is warier. The idiom can also be a way of changing the subject, a polite refusal to examine a loss too closely. Clash's reviewer thought the ill health hangs heavy over the record and suggested it might fundamentally alter the way Kiwanuka makes music in future.^[1] Seen that way, the closer is less a conclusion than a pause.

A third reading is simply structural. Albums need endings, and a calm, reflective title makes a graceful one. Not every closing track has to carry a revelation.

Why it resonates

Part of the pull is the plainness of the idea. Almost everyone has used the phrase, and almost everyone has needed it. It names an attitude that is neither optimistic nor despairing, the stubborn middle ground where most lives are actually lived.

Kiwanuka has said he wanted to tell people why he had been away, and that everyone can relate to pain and struggle.^[2] A closing song built on that shared, ordinary wisdom fits the sentiment. It does not ask for sympathy. It offers company.

Conclusion

"Swings and Roundabouts" is a young song, and its fuller meaning will emerge as listeners, critics and perhaps the artist himself speak about it. For now, the evidence is the title, the placement, and the record around it. Together they suggest a closing statement of equilibrium, delivered by a songwriter who has spent a career turning difficulty into warmth.

That it arrives at the end of an album whose release was delayed by serious illness gives it extra weight. But the song's real subject, an even-handed acceptance of how fortune moves, was never his alone. It belongs to anyone who has ever shrugged, breathed out, and carried on.