I meet Ghostpoet in a north London photo studio a few days before the UK government announced its official Covid-19 lockdown and already it feels illicit to be out of the house and meeting other human beings in the flesh. But if there was ever a relevant time to create this story, it is now. This is an artist who has long provided the soundtrack to our troubled times and his imminent fifth album, I Grow Tired But I Dare Not Fall Asleep, is his most urgent to date.

“My music is very much steeped in the world at large and the human emotions that we all experience on a daily basis,” Ghostpoet tells me, coffee mug in one hand, his head in the other. He didn’t sleep well the night before – a common occurrence, it seems - and needs the caffeine revival. “We are going through a terrible time now, so it makes sense to create music that reflects what’s real, which is something I’ve always tried to do.”

The artist isn’t just talking about the impending pandemic of course. This is not a prophetic work but the long player does roam wide to navigate both the conservative socio-political landscape at large to address issues around immigration and race – as well as personal concerns to do with masculinity, anxiety and love/hate relationships.

“Politics is part of everyday life, more so now than ever. I’m not interested in beating people over the head with a message; it’s just important to capture what’s in the air. And right now, that’s the complete destruction of everything I love, pretty much,” he says. “The turmoil that is happening in the world is directly affecting me, my friends and my family. I can touch it. I’ve always been in the dark side of life – there’s more richness there than anything airy fairy - and now I feel comfortable embracing it.”

The first single, Concrete Pony sets the sonic scene, its alluringly soft bass notes, wailing violins and air raid siren effects simmering under Ghostpoet’s unmistakably maudlin and deceptively understated vocals. “The song is throwing up questions around social media and the hunger for likes. It’s nothing but means so much to people, including myself,” he explains.

And this week comes the second single, Nowhere To Hide – all insistent keys and uneasy percussion - which to me, feels like an allusion to the power play of global leaders and the fear-induced street level violence that results from that. Are you the dissident or the bystander? The lover or the hater? The cure or the cause? Similarly, the title track pulls himself up from the stupor of complacency and inner panic in order to be totally present: “I started wanting to throw it all away and head off to start again somewhere remote that wasn’t so troublesome,” he confides. “But I’m still hanging in… you have to.”

Ghostpoet wrote and produced the entire album himself but still keeps good company with an all-woman line-up of guest vocalists featuring Art School Girlfriend, Skinny Girl Diet’s Delilah Holiday, SaraSara and Katie Dove Dixon. “I love women and everything they represent, so at any opportunity I can get, I want that energy in my music.”

Meanwhile the album cover sees him assume the woman’s role in a recreation of Romantic artist Henry Fuselli’s infamous oil painting The Nightmare. Within the composition you can also spy Safe, Derek Owusu’s 2019 book of essays about the experiences of Black British men, and a likeness of William Onyeabor - the Nigerian musician whose 1970s futurist funk was latterly rediscovered by David Byrne for a project Ghostpoet contributed to. “I was inspired by the fact that Onyeabor flew in the face of what was expected of an African artist back then. Plus it’s a nice nod to my Nigerian roots.”

Real name Obaro Ejimiwe, the artist was born in south London to a Nigerian father and Dominican mother and grew up with an early appreciation of Fela Kuti’s afrobeat. He began making music while at university and self-released his first EP The Sound Of Strangers in 2010. “I knew even then that I didn’t want to make music in a particular genre. I just made my own weird stuff for a while, until somehow I got a chance to make a record,” he recalls modestly.

In other words, he caught the attention of Gilles Peterson who releasing his debut album Peanut Butter Blues & Melancholy Jam, which promptly earned Ghostpoet a Mercury Award nomination. Since then he’s steadily developed his unruly path along which he’s released three more albums, received a second Mercury nod, travelled to Mali with Damon Albarn’s Africa Express and collaborated with Micachu, The Streets, Massive Attack and Nadine Shah, among others.

A decade down the line, his music may be more polished than at the outset but it remains as uncompromising – and wide awake - as ever. “When I listen to my early stuff I think ‘What was I doing?’ because I’ve learnt so much since then,” he says with a wry smile. “But at the same time, I like the messiness of it and try to keep that element alive. I don’t feel that I have to make a pristine, clean album. If I am trying to reflect real life, then life isn’t pristine and clean; life is messy and odd and wayward, and that’s fine.”

As our conversation comes to a close, Ghostpoet pulls out his mobile – an old iPhone with a screen as shattered as his sleeping patterns – and selects some of his new songs to listen to during the impending portrait session. Time for one last question. Weary as he may sound on I Grow Tired, what are his hopes for it? “I think it should be really successful – it’s a great record. And I say that because I know the work that I’ve put into it and I just feel it deserves a chance to be heard by as many people as possible… We shall see.”