ALBERTA TO NEW ORLEANS TO LAGOS.

Funk Doc Meth writes from Alberta, Canada — prairie winters, long shifts, and a record collection that never let the 90s East Coast cipher go quiet. The cadence is boom-bap: dusty breaks, hard snares, and bars built like brickwork.

Underneath it runs the other half of the bloodline — Afro-Reggae pulse, highlife brass, and the Fela lineage that turns a groove into an argument. It is music made for people who left somewhere and are still building here.

In 2023 a poetry event in New York put Funk Doc Meth in the same room as Jamie and Glowie — the couple who record as The Standard Bearers, out of New Orleans. One night of readings turned into a working partnership.

They began writing and researching together on Black excellence: the inventors, the freedom fighters, the mathematicians and the mothers whose names got shaved off the record. The research became verses; the verses became a catalogue.

The more they wrote, the clearer the family resemblance got. New Orleans jazz and its trumpet language kept answering the horn lines in Fela's Afrobeat — the same call, the same refusal, two ports on one ocean.

When Jamie and Glowie travelled to Lagos for Felabration, the circle closed. They learned that Funk Doc Meth had been one of the architects who worked on the New Afrika Shrine, the venue run by Fela's son Femi Kuti. The collaboration was not a meeting; it was a reunion nobody had scheduled.

Funk Doc Meth and The Standard Bearers have a number of unreleased tracks in the vault. The first to reach the world is "Others Like Us", out on 12 September 2026 across 22 major music platforms.

Alongside it stands Strange Country — fifteen tracks of conscious storytelling, 808s and root culture — plus the Education Hub, where the history behind the bars is free to read.