Tolika Mtoliki, a six-track album from Johannesburg-based performance art band The Brother Moves On, is a meditation on history and the ways it dictates our day-to-day lives. “The personal is always political,” the band’s frontman, Siyabonga Mthembu, tells Apple Music. “As [black people] we have this fear that history, or the archive, will forget us. But the question is which archive are we referring to? Our music lives in the hearts of our people.” Half seance and half ambush, Tolika Mtoliki is an album not afraid to run with its fists raised, tackling issues such as colonialism (“You Think You Know Me”) and migrant labour (“Kea Bereka”). Here, Siyabonga Mthembu breaks down the inspiration for each track. “You Think You Know Me” “The first version of ‘You Think You Know Me’ didn’t have a poem in it. The record label heard an early version and asked us to add a poem to it. One day I was sitting with my mother, writing a poem, and she was helping me write it. We released it during the July [2021] riots. I was down with COVID and I called my record label and told them to release the song. The same kind of pain that inspired the riots, inspired me to write that record.” “For Mo” “‘For Mo’ is a record we wrote in homage to the late jazz pianist Moses Molelekwa. It’s a song we wrote years ago. Mo’s album, Genes and Spirits saved my life. I used to listen to it when I was young, broke and unsure about what I wanted to do with my life. When I was growing in Tembisa, I used to work for my mother, and Mo’s family home was a few houses down from my mother’s house. He’s always been part and parcel of what I am and who we are as a band.” “We Madoda” “We’ve always believed [as a band] that the personal is always politic. ‘We Madoda’ is a song about capitalism. It's asking why we’ve stopped farming? Why is capitalism the only way for us to feed ourselves? That’s the song’s biggest metaphor. It’s also inspired by the Thomas Sankara quote: ‘He who feeds you controls you’.” “Anishilabi” “You know when a youngster hears a song and goes, ‘Wow, I love that song’ and then you actually introduce them to the original? That’s the whole point of ‘Anishilabi’ and the music we do. This is a remake of a song by [’70s jazz outfit] Batsumi. We hope the music can introduce our audience to the wealth of South African music out there. Someone’s going to listen to this and discover Batsumi. Which is the point of the whole project: no one ever gets forgotten.” “Kea Bereka” “‘You know, most of the problems we have as black people are linked to the essential problem of the black family being eradicated by migrant labour. This might actually be the first generation that’s learning to live and work with their wives. The song isn’t trying to excuse that, but to contextualise where we come from as a people and where we still have to go.”