By The Grvy Editorial Board · The Drop · From the Catalog
Artist: Othello’s Groove · Genre: Afro House / Deep House · Released: April 2025 · Format: Album · Tracks: 11
After the trap-EDM detour of Long Live Trap EDM, the catalog comes home — and goes deeper. Deep Afro House is Othello’s Groove returning to the source the project’s name promises: house music built on African rhythm, where the drum is not decoration but argument.
The tracklist tells the arc in miniature. It opens in the body — “Wiggle,” “Fogo” (fire, in Portuguese), “Footwork” — three titles that are instructions as much as names. The middle turns generous and then tender: “Give It All to Me,” “Give Me Some More,” “Feel the Vibe,” “Deep Love.” And the close cools the room down on purpose — “Brand New Day,” the wry aside of “Really Though,” the warning shot of “This Is Your Last Chance,” and finally “Mellow Me Out,” an album exhaling. Eleven tracks, sequenced like a night that knows when to peak and when to let people find their coats and their feelings.
What matters in the catalog’s chronology is that this is April 2025 — before the After Hours expansion, before the second Deep Afro House that would arrive in October. This record is the template being set in public: percussion forward, patience intact, the deep-house sustain of Deep House Party now carrying a distinctly African pulse underneath it.
Context: Afro house’s global decade was built by artists who treated rhythm as heritage — Black Coffee carried South African house to the world’s biggest rooms without sanding off its roots, Shimza turned the one-man-show format into a broadcast ritual, and Caiiro built long, spiritual arcs out of percussion and patience. Deep Afro House works that same seam from a Miami base: diaspora music made by someone for whom the diaspora is not a theme but an address. Placed beside those reference points, the record’s claim is modest and real — it belongs in the conversation about where the sound travels next.
Verdict: The template record — the groove, deepened at the source. 4.5/5
Listen: Apple Music · streaming on all major platforms
Next in From the Catalog: DJ Enigma XXL returns with Who’s Going to Speak up For Palestine? (May 2025).
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