Kofi Stone is in full bloom

For a man nicknamed ‘The Mayor of Brum’, Kofi Stone is remarkably humble. With over a decade of work, a dedicated fanbase and collaborations with the likes of Loyle Carner, Maverick Sabre and Benjamin Zephaniah, the hip-hop artist’s ever-increasing discography feels as fresh as his best-known hit, ‘Talk About Us’, did in 2019. Slightly pixelated across our video call, Kofi Stone wears a trimmed beard, a warm smile and a black football jersey emblazoned with the word ‘nothing’. One of his first jobs, he tells me as we begin our chat, was selling clothes at COW, a vintage shop in Birmingham, where he’d bring home something new every shift. “I used to spend my wage every day on buying clothes,” he laughs.

Since then, Stone has honed his style — from his fashion sense through to his music. His upcoming album, All The Flowers Have Bloomed, is a delicate arrangement of hiphop, R&B and rap. Woven into each song is a subtle floral thread, which unites themes of love, growth and admiration. And the album’s title celebrates this culmination of years of dedication. “It’s like you’ve got to this point in your life where everything you’ve been working for has now come to fruition,” he tells me. But the EP is also about accepting the natural cycles of life and embracing the present. “Everything’s going to work out how it should, and where you are now is exactly where you should be,” Stone aphorises. And for him, that’s as simple as those he loves — his family — doing well. “The supporters are happy. I’m happy. There’s a lot of joy, a lot of love.”

Personal philosophies aside, the album’s theme also has a more simple side to it. “I do love flowers,” Stone professes from his house in Birmingham, where he’s framed by the bright turquoise doors and yellow walls behind him. As he speaks, he gently taps his chest. “You plant seeds and you water them and good things come.” One such seed is Stone’s love for poetry, which was planted in him by his grandfather. While writing the album, Stone let poetry guide him, but as its release date approaches, he’s started considering its reception. “Flowers aren’t the most macho thing for a guy, especially in rap,” he says. But that doesn’t seem to bother him. “I feel like I’ve always lived in a world outside of what would be a rapper on paper,” he muses. “I’m comfortable in my role.” Now, Stone cherishes the chance to represent different models of masculinity: “What some may say is softer, I’d say is more beautiful.”

Sometimes this means being vulnerable in his music, unearthing his insecurities, his fears and his loves. Tracks like ‘Thorns’, for example, are packed with raw emotion. Other times, though, Stone opts for a more playful approach to his music. One of those recalls how, after a show in Copenhagen, a woman kept flirting with him despite his clear disinterest. The song it inspired uses upbeat tempo and spikey lyrics to tell a perfect antilove story. “Beautiful girl,” he remembers, “but yeah, I was on my own journey.”

Indeed, Stone’s journey to the present is the result of decades of careful cultivation. Where music is concerned, Stone performed for the first time at the age of eight, singing ‘Give Thanks’ with his church choir. “It burned,” he says, “I felt this burning desire to sing.” But it took a few more years for music to take root. “I parked it,” he recalls. “When you’re a child, you’re playing your Game Boy, and life’s moving fast.” But in secondary school, the burning returned after hearing some older kids rap battling in the canteen. A friend’s sister nudged him to join in. “I just annihilated him,” Stone smiles, “I got a few aura points there. I think he kind of had it in for me after that.”

Not long after, Stone performed an original song, entitled ‘Heart Attack’, in his school talent show and won. “From then, I was kind of just trying to get people to listen to my music,” he recalls. Burning CDs, writing poetry and making mixtapes, Stone dedicated himself to his craft. While his classmates were going to parties or buying fake IDs, he was writing poems, recording vocals on a telemarketing headset and editing tracks on Windows 98. “My mom was a little bit strict,” he says warmly. “I spent quite a lot of time on my own as a kid. It gave me the space to do music in its entirety.”

When he wasn’t honing his storytelling, he would watch music videos with his sister or play on his console. Roaming the streets in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Stone stumbled onto the in-game radio. This is where he heard ‘The Message’ by Grandmaster and The Furious Five for the first time. This is where he fell in love with hip-hop. Early on, games continued to inspire his music taste, with FIFA leading him to discover Avril Lavigne, Ms. Dynamite and ‘Black and White Town’ by Doves. And when he mentions how a song he collaborated on — ‘Black Eye’ by SANITY — was featured on FIFA 25, a grin lights up his face. From going full circle on childhood pastimes to adulthood life lessons, All The Flowers Have Bloomed marks a blossoming of perspectives. “A man that looks at the world the same as he did at thirty when he’s fifty, just wasted twenty years of his life,” Stone warrants.

Certainly, after a near death experience with malaria in 2022, he’s earned his wisdom stripes. ‘Heartlands’, which came out in August, was written about his hospitalisation and the thirst for life it gave him. Stuck in bed and strapped into wires, Stone wasn’t sure he would make it out. The song captures that pleading. “It’s about going through the motions of sickness and not knowing what’s going to happen,” he says. Named after the hospital where he was treated, it’s one of the artist’s most vulnerable tracks, and the one he was most nervous about releasing. But it’s also a song about wanting to stick around for your mum and the people that love you.

This theme of motherhood and nurturing is something that sweeps through Stone’s work. On the album, ‘Thorns’, featuring Jacob Banks, tells the story of a single mother with schizophrenia. Blending hip-hop and R&B, the track demonstrates both intricate songwriting and nuanced storytelling. “I can’t speak on being a mother,” he says, “but I think it’s important to highlight what mothers do — what they bring to the world, to their family, and the sacrifices they make.” And, on top of everything else, Stone’s own mother was crucial in developing his taste in music. He tells me how his love for gospel stems from afternoons spent listening to Cece Winans with her in the kitchen.

A little like a mother with her baby, Stone is looking forward to seeing the fruits of his labour when he gets to perform his new album live — especially since, in 2024, he had to postpone his UK and Europe tour due to the rising cost of being an independent artist. “I felt like I was letting people down,” he says. Almost a year later, Stone is back, with venue dates in London, Bristol, Manchester, Berlin and the Netherlands. But it’s not been easy to get there. “Unless you’re in the industry, supporters probably don’t always know what’s going on behind the scenes,” he explains. Now, he hopes to pay his good fortune forward to other artists like Lizzie Berchie through his own record label, Tru Community. “I’m super proud of Lizzie and Tru Community as a whole,” Stone beams. “It’s still early days but making things easier for the next generation of artists coming through? That’s the most important thing.”

In the same way, Stone has nurtured a community of great collaborations, which became invaluable to creating All The Flowers Have Bloomed. Jacob Banks’ soulful voice transforms ‘Thorns’ into an R&B classic, while Maverick Sabre infuses another of the tracks with a hint of post-dubstep. Recording with Sabre again, he notes, was one of Stone’s favourite sessions on the album. “We were just jamming and vibing and bouncing off ideas,” he says. Though he admits they couldn’t quite get the song to work at first, by pushing through and tapping into their vulnerability, they eventually found their way. “It was really pure,” Stone says.

As someone who has cultivated a career in hip-hop through honesty and humility, it makes sense that his favourite upcoming lyric is from ‘Rainfall’: “All a man has is his word and his father’s name.” It’s an explicit championing of Stone’s family values — something so integral to the artist that it even informed his moniker. Initially, Stone had a budding career in grime and electro under the stage name M.O.D, but something wasn’t sitting right. “I took a break to understand who I was and what I wanted to say as an artist,” the rapper tells me.

When it came to re-branding, Stone recalled the nickname his grandfather had given him after his birth, following a troublesome pregnancy in which his mother had almost miscarried: Kofi Tormekpe. A Ghanaian word from the Ewe language, “‘Tormekpe’,” Stone explains, “is our word which means ‘water stone’”. Almost twenty-five years after his grandfather coined it, the artist rechristened himself as Kofi Stone. It’s a name that honours his grandfather’s poeticism and wider Ghanaian heritage, but it goes even further. It underpins everything Stone’s artist persona represents — a persona, much like the combined resilience and beauty of a sunflower, characterised by quiet strength. “Stones in water,” he concludes, “don’t break.”