Ghanaian-British artist, writer and cultural producer dabieh turns a painful friendship experience into a deeper reflection on love, loss and human nature on his new single, ‘blunted axe. (on friendship)’.
Released on September 18, the South London-based artist’s latest record serves as the first glimpse into an upcoming project that examines everyday life through a philosophical lens, touching on themes including class, friendship, faith, fatherhood and the search for meaning.
Produced alongside Ted Turner, ‘blunted axe. (on friendship)’ carries a melancholic atmosphere built around sparse guitar arrangements and gospel-inspired choral textures. Rather than relying on a heavily layered production, the song leaves room for dabieh’s intimate vocal delivery and storytelling to carry the emotional weight.
At the centre of the record is the ending of a friendship and the complicated emotions that can follow. Dabieh uses that experience to question why romantic relationships are often allowed to be complicated, while friendships can quickly be reduced to simple ideas of who was right and who was wrong.
That question gives the song much of its emotional depth. Instead of treating the loss of a friendship as a straightforward story of betrayal, dabieh considers the possibility that two opposing truths can exist at the same time. Someone can cause harm while still having played an important role in your life, and a relationship can end without erasing everything meaningful that came before it.
“When friendships end, we often rewrite the entire relationship to make sense of the loss,” dabieh explains. “Memory becomes a tool for self-preservation, sometimes at the expense of truth. In the song I wanted to ask whether we can hold a more difficult position: recognising the harm someone caused while still honouring the love, history and meaning that once existed?”
The philosophical approach is central to dabieh’s wider creative identity. His work often looks beyond conventional music subjects, drawing on ideas around class, community and human behaviour to explore the quieter forces that shape people’s lives.
The release is also being supported by a series of short visual vignettes directed by dabieh himself. The visuals will extend the ideas introduced in the song across his social platforms, giving the story another dimension beyond the music.
While ‘blunted axe. (on friendship)’ introduces dabieh as a recording artist, his creative career extends well beyond music. He has spent more than a decade developing cultural platforms and producing independent creative projects, including his work as a co-founder of Cloud X.
Through Cloud X, dabieh contributed to projects involving artists, film, live programming and a major London festival, with the platform’s work generating hundreds of millions of streams and bringing thousands of people together.
His work also extends into cultural conversations outside the entertainment space. As a member of Southwark’s Black Culture Conversation steering group, he contributes to discussions surrounding cultural participation, public space and the relationship between institutions and the communities they serve.
With ‘blunted axe. (on friendship)’, dabieh brings those different parts of his creative identity together. The song is personal, but its questions are broader than one broken friendship. It asks listeners to consider how memory changes after loss, how people make sense of betrayal, and whether relationships can still hold meaning after they have ended.
The single is the first taste of dabieh’s forthcoming project, expected this winter. If ‘blunted axe. (on friendship)’ is an indication of what is ahead, the project promises to use music, storytelling and philosophy to examine the complicated realities of everyday life.
Rather than offering easy answers, dabieh is interested in sitting with the difficult questions. On his latest release, friendship becomes the starting point for a much wider conversation about love, grief, memory and what it means to understand another person after the relationship has changed.
