Immy shares ‘Hole In My Name’, a song written for his friends across the African Australian diaspora who still carry colonial-era surnames, sung from the perspective of someone watching another lost in a nameless purgatory. The single is produced by Henry Jenkins of the Grammy Award winning Frollen Music Library.
Whilst living with his family in Cape Coast, Ghana, Immy visited the town’s Slave Castle. There he saw the ‘Door of No Return’, where the slaves were forced through, stripped of their identities, never to see their homeland again. Returning to a Catholic all-boys school in regional Geelong, with little contact with his Ghanaian father, Immy developed what he describes as “a huge hole in my chest”, one that took him until his late twenties to begin filling with music, reconnecting with his roots, family and self.
Musically, the single leans heavier into the psychedelic, with fuzzed out guitar taking centre stage and driving rhythm and percussion elements. Whirring and buzzing synths fly overhead played by Matt Hall, while the 10 person choir calls in response to bolster the chorus.The song widens that lens to the many friends across the African diaspora who carry ancestral scars in their own family names, and to a country with its own gaps in history and identity. The Adinkra symbol on the single artwork is Abode Santan (The All Seeing Eye), a reminder that we are each a connected expression of the universe rather than separate from it, with the painting created by Julius Sackey.
Immy says of the single, “There’s holes in our flag, our history and our entire identity. We have a diverse country built by many people with holes and gaps in their own ways and their own lives.”