After five years of work, six singles, and a rollout that has steadily built him into one of the most electrifying new voices on the West Coast, ALPHA CENTAURI is here with his full debut album, ‘The Future Right Now,’ out now via Rogue Planet. “Never Be,” “Grow,” “Get Your Money Up,” “I’ll Fly,” “Higher Up” and “We Rise” each landed with their own moment in the spotlight, and together they were only the warmup. The ten-track album that follows is the real arrival, a genre blending, funk soaked, Afrobeat charged, jazz-tinged hip-hop statement recorded entirely live off the floor with his eight-piece band, and it is the sound of a star fully stepping into focus.
ALPHA’s own story is exactly the kind that makes a debut like this hit harder. Trained and licensed as a lawyer in Zimbabwe, he walked away from a secure, respected career to chase the thing he could never actually let go of, music. It started long before law school, back when he was 13 years old breakdancing with his crew, Blade Squad, at pageants and basketball halftime shows. When people warned him that no one would respect a lawyer who breakdanced, he didn’t quit, he transformed. “I took what I understood from dancing, rhythm and movement, and turned it into rap,” he says. “I tapped into my background in English literature and realized, I know how to write poems. I understand rhythm. Maybe I can do this.” That leap of faith is the entire album in miniature.
Even his name carries that same spark. Searching the sky for answers one night, ALPHA caught his own reflection in a window and realized he’d had the answer inside him the whole time. He named himself after the closest star system to our own, a symbol of the inner light he’d carried all along, quietly waiting to be turned all the way up.
‘The Future Right Now’ is built entirely around that idea: self belief as fuel, motivation as philosophy, the present moment as the only place the future actually gets built. “Everything I do today, everything I did all these years, has brought me here, because my future was always in the present,” ALPHA says, and the record delivers on that promise track after track. “We Rise,” now the unquestioned crowd favourite of his live show, was originally written back in 2014 while he was finishing his law degree, an almost prophetic vision of a life he hadn’t lived yet and now is, word for word. “Aria’s Lullaby” closes the album as a tribute to his daughter, written as a diary entry in 2016 before she was even born, its lyrics never changed since. “Expect Us” channels real testimony, drawn directly from ALPHA’s own experience as a practicing lawyer in Zimbabwe supporting the movement built by activist Evan Mawarire against corruption and injustice. And “Never Be” is a full display of technical firepower, stacking wordplay, literary references and mythology into bars built to be replayed just to catch everything packed inside them.
Behind ALPHA stands a genuinely stacked eight-piece band, brought to life by producer Wes Smith and mixed by acclaimed engineer Justin Hicks, with more than 20 guest musicians contributing across the sessions. Drummer Richard Brown supplies the relentless, room shaking energy that anchors every show, guitarist Cuyler Biller threads in guitar licks pulling from Zimbabwean Sungura tradition, and keyboardists Alli Bean and Max Zipursky round out a live unit ALPHA says turns every performance into something completely alive.
That live reputation has already put ALPHA on some seriously big stages. He has shared bills with Method Man & Redman, Ja Rule, Chali 2na and Cut Chemist of Jurassic 5, The OBGMs, Moka Only and Tanika Charles, and lit up major festival stages across Western Canada including the Khatsalano Street Party, the Calgary Stampede and Victoria’s official Canada Day party. He was set to share the True Rhythm Festival stage with Public Enemy and G-Eazy this year, a dream bill postponed by regional wildfires but very much still ahead of him, a sign of exactly the level ALPHA is now operating at.
And he is only getting started. Beyond ‘The Future Right Now,’ ALPHA has two new creative outlets already in motion, pop project Star Maps, led by forthcoming single “Juliet” and mixed in Los Angeles by Matt Bishop, whose credits include U2, The Killers, Modest Mouse and Taylor Swift, and R&B venture The Golden Hour Collective, both paving the way toward a sophomore LP in 2027. Vinyl and CD editions of ‘The Future Right Now’ arrive early next year, alongside cross Canada touring and potential UK and European dates still to come.
“I want people to hear this and see themselves inside the music,” ALPHA says, and with ‘The Future Right Now’ now fully in the world, that is exactly what a genuine star in the making sounds like, unmistakably himself, and only rising from here.
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