If you’ve followed the beats of his half-century career, you’ll know Vernon Reid as an artist who paints in every colour. Depending on the era you dive into and the album on your turntable, you’ll find the New York polymath pinballing between jazz, metal, punk, funk, electronica and hip-hop, cutting heads with collaborators as eclectic as Mick Jagger and Public Enemy, endlessly shedding his skin yet always speaking his truth.

Globally celebrated as a giant of electric guitar (he was recently hailed by Rolling Stone amongst the top 50 players of all-time), Reid’s Grammy Award-winning records with alt-rock trailblazers, Living Colour, still sound as fresh and fierce as when Cult Of Personality hijacked the Billboard chart in the late-’80s. But to take the pulse of the zeitgeist as he sees it – and hear his fearless musicality in microcosm – you need only drop the needle on his acclaimed new solo album, Hoodoo Telemetry, released October 3, 2025 on Artone / The Players Club Records.

“Hoodoo Telemetry,” considers the 66-year-old of this kaleidoscopic 14-track opus, “is like a piece of my all-over-the-place mind. It took me a while to start this record because I was thinking about what I wanted to do next, managing my time with all my other projects. I was also in different spaces with these songs: some are new, others are reclamations of material from a long time ago. But suddenly, I found the focus and it was very clear to me: I gotta do this now.”

Hoodoo Telemetry isn’t a linear piece, but a thrillingly tangled tapestry of genres, collaborators and material from different time periods. Its energy and chaos seems to reflect and challenge what Reid considers the “tumultuous” socio-political backdrop it will soundtrack. “Everything I do,” he points out, “is a protest of one kind or another.”

It’s true: Reid never took the path of least resistance. Born in London on 22 August 1958, to music-loving parents of the Windrush generation, within a year the family had upped and moved to New York City. He remembers the seismic shift of hearing The Beatles on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 and the moment a guitar called to him. “I heard Carlos Santana’s Black Magic Woman and it entranced me.”

Yet Reid’s cultural awakening sprawled in every direction. “I loved music at a cellular level. And all kinds of music. James Brown, Hendrix, Band of Gypsys, Sly And The Family Stone, Cream. The psychedelic movement. Miles Davis going electric, y’know, Live-Evil and Bitches Brew. All of those people that went to different places and did different things with their music. I liked the idea of a musician risking it all to change.”