Home Again by Michael Kiwanuka

Home Again, Michael Kiwanuka's debut, arrived on Polydor on 12 March 2012, the same year the London singer-songwriter won the BBC's Sound of 2012, and it's about as far from hype as a hyped record gets. Paul Butler of the Bees produced it down in the Steam Rooms, the studio in his basement at home in Ventnor on the Isle of Wight, and you can hear the room: warm, woody, unhurried soul with a folk singer's patience.

Kiwanuka's voice does the heavy lifting, rich and burnished, across four singles: the title track, "I'm Getting Ready", "I'll Get Along" and "Bones". Critics warmed to it, it reached number 4 in the UK, and it had sold more than 70,000 copies there by May 2012 on its way to going gold.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.