Grace Jones returned to a London stage in June 2008, delivering a two-hour set at the Meltdown festival that mixed old theatrical menace with four unheard songs. The Jamaican-born singer, model and former 1980s disco queen was about to end a silence that had lasted nearly two decades. On November 3, 2008, her tenth studio album Hurricane was released in the United Kingdom on the Wall of Sound label. It was her first record of new material in 19 years.
Years of sessions and Compass Point
Why did it take so long? Part of the answer lies in how Hurricane was made. Sessions stretched over several years, and Jones did not rush. She produced the album herself alongside Ivor Guest, Antony Genn and Bruce Woolley, and she brought in Brian Eno as producer, keyboardist and backing vocalist. Even more telling, she reunited with the Compass Point Allstars, the session players who had shaped her most adventurous 1980s records. Sly Dunbar, Robbie Shakespeare, Wally Badarou, Barry Reynolds, Mikey Chung and Uziah 'Sticky' Thompson all appear, giving the album a dub-wise, electronic, trip-hop and R&B texture that feels both familiar and unsettled. The album also reached listeners worldwide through PIAS, which handled distribution everywhere except North America.
The songs themselves refused to behave like a safe comeback. Lead single 'Corporate Cannibal' arrived on August 24, 2008, a grinding electronic attack on corporate capitalism that sounded nothing like nostalgia. 'Williams' Blood' followed on December 8, 2008, weaving the hymn 'Amazing Grace' into a story about family and survival. 'Well Well Well' was written for Alex Sadkin, the co-producer of three of Jones's 1980s albums, who died in 1987. The title track went back even further: it had first been recorded with Tricky under the name 'Cradle to the Grave'. Another track, 'Sunset Sunrise', turned toward the relationship between humanity and nature.
Autobiography and chocolate heads
Hurricane also let Jones write about herself more directly than she had in years. 'This Is', 'Williams' Blood' and 'I'm Crying (Mother's Tears)' are all autobiographical, and the album is dedicated to the memory of her father, Bishop Robert W. Jones. That personal thread runs through the record's strangest visual statement too. The cover shows chocolate heads of Grace Jones, cast at the Thorntons factory in Derbyshire by John Schoonraad, his son Tristan and the artist Nick Reynolds. Inside the booklet, Jones poses as a chocolate factory worker, a joke about consumption and image that only she could pull off.
The reaction suggested the wait had been worth it. Reviewers were mostly warm, with the album earning a 72 out of 100 on Metacritic. In January 2009 Jones took the songs on the road with The Hurricane Tour, proving that the material could hold a stage as well as her old hits. The album went on to receive a gold certification from the Independent Music Companies Association for sales of at least 100,000 copies in Europe, a solid result for a record this uncompromising.
Hurricane's afterlife has been just as unusual as its creation. A dub version called Hurricane – Dub appeared on September 5, 2011, assembled by Ivor Guest with a small team of collaborators. The cover for that edition was created by Jean-Paul Goude, the French artist who had shaped Jones's iconic visual identity decades earlier, and it shows her with a cigarette in a sparkling hat. It was a fitting coda: even the remix album refused to be ordinary.
Grace Jones did not make another album until 2015, when Disco arrived. But Hurricane remains the pivot point, the record where she stopped being a legend on pause and became a working artist again. It took 19 years for her to release new music, and she used that time to build something that could stand beside her strangest, most personal work. The chocolate heads, the dub textures, the hymn inside a family story: this was not a comeback designed for easy playlists. It was Grace Jones reminding everyone that her silence had never been empty.