Coming In From The Cold - Chronixx Exile Reviewed
This 17-track collection, produced by the quiet genius Inflo, arrives not with the triumphant fanfare of a conquering hero but with the quiet gravity of someone who has traveled far and returned changed.
- Lloyd "Reggaeology" Laing
Eight years is a long time to wait.
Long enough for anticipation to curdle into doubt, for a blazing debut to fade into memory, for an artist to disappear entirely. But Chronixx hasn't disappeared, he's been elsewhere, in that liminal space the title Exile suggests: neither fully present nor entirely gone, suspended between worlds.
This 17-track collection, produced by the quiet genius Inflo, arrives not with the triumphant fanfare of a conquering hero but with the quiet gravity of someone who has traveled far and returned changed. And that difference, that eight-year distance, is audible in every corner of this remarkable album.
What strikes you first is how patient it all feels.
Where Chronology announced itself with youthful urgency, Exile unfolds with the deliberate pace of reflection. Inflo's production work, having already proven transformative for Sault, Michael Kiwanuka, and Cleo Sol, wraps Chronixx's voice in textures that feel both vintage and futuristic. Classic roots reggae structures are here, yes, but they're refracted through soul's emotional vocabulary and an experimental willingness to let songs breathe, drift, and occasionally unsettle.
Chronixx's voice is still warm, still righteous, but there's something else now.
A defiance that sounds less like protest and more like survival. When he sings of identity, family, community, and resilience, these aren't abstract concepts but lived realities. The album title becomes less metaphor and more autobiography: exile as an emotional state, a spiritual condition, a political reality, and an artistic choice.
Exile, at its core, is a beautiful musical melancholy, a gentle beauty revealed in the sadness of his own artistic exile.
It's this tension and beauty emerging from a distance; It is his artistic clarity born out of separation that gives Exile its peculiar power.
This isn't an album trying to reclaim lost ground or prove anything to skeptics. It's the work of someone who has made peace with the margins, who has discovered that the view from outside can be its own revelation.
In an era when reggae often feels frozen between nostalgia and novelty, Exile has cut a path through the overgrowth, revealing a path once walked that few rarely follow these days.
Evolution without abandonment, innovation rooted in tradition.
It's an album that respects reggae's deep history while refusing to be confined by it, that speaks to a global audience without diluting its message, wrapped in the soundscape of meaningful culture.
Whether this will translate to Grammy recognition or chart success feels almost beside the point. Exile is the rare album that sounds exactly like what it needed to be—unhurried, uncompromising, and deeply itself.
Welcome back, Chronixx. The wait, it turns out, was worth it.
