For Joseph Rutakangwa, music has always been tied to memory.

A melody can bring back a place, a person, or a feeling he thought he had forgotten. Long before he became a recording artist, music was one of the ways he understood the world around him. His influences never stayed neatly within one genre either, moving through soul, rock, Afropop, indie folk and Latin music.

Yet beneath that range is a simple instinct: make people feel something.

Rutakangwa has always been particularly drawn to music stripped to its emotional essentials - a piano, an acoustic guitar, a bass, a voice and something worth saying.

He began releasing music publicly in 2020, when the uncertainty of the pandemic confronted him with a realization familiar to many people at the time: life is fragile, and the dreams continually saved for later may never happen.

So he stopped waiting.

The years that followed became a period of exploration. Songs including “Avani,” “I Am Meant for You” and “Please God” revealed different sides of an artist experimenting with sound while gradually discovering what felt most natural to him.

Six years later, that exploration is leading somewhere much more personal.

Rutakangwa is now developing a new album built around love, but not love as uncomplicated romance. He is interested in the contradiction underneath it: wanting someone deeply while being frightened by what it means to need them.

Closeness and distance. Certainty and fear. The instinct to run and the decision to stay.

Rather than treating the project as a collection of unrelated songs, Rutakangwa is approaching the album as one emotional journey. Each song moves the relationship forward, revealing another stage of intimacy and another version of the person experiencing it.

That evolution is becoming visual, too.

In a new series of portraits, Rutakangwa appears against a shadowed studio backdrop in an oversized green varsity jacket and loose patterned trousers. Some images are quiet and introspective; others capture movement, confidence and flashes of joy. Together, they reflect the same contrasts beginning to define his next musical chapter.

For an artist whose influences have always traveled freely across genres, the goal now is not to force the music into a category. It is to make it more emotionally precise.

There is something universally recognizable in that territory. Falling in love can feel euphoric precisely because there is something to lose. Being known by another person can be comforting and terrifying at once. Sometimes the person moving closer is also the person fighting the urge to disappear.

That tension sits at the heart of what Rutakangwa is creating now.

The album’s title, tracklist and release date remain under wraps. For the moment, he is allowing this next chapter to reveal itself gradually.

His recording career began because he decided life was too uncertain to keep postponing something he loved.

Now the question has changed.

What happens when, instead of running away, you choose to stay?