Bokanté began as a studio project centred around the collaboration between Guadeloupian singer/songwriter Malika Tirolien and Snarky Puppy bass player Michael League. League having constructed their 2017 debut album Strange Circles from remote contributions, Bokanté went on to become a performing entity. Their tour with Metropole Orkest led to an award-winning 2018 live album – What Heat – and History is their third, this time recorded at a collective gathering at League's Catalonia base. Tirolien has a strong and versatile voice, reminiscent of Angelique Kidjo or Fatoumata Diawara, and she mostly sings in the Creole-French dialect of her homeland. Despite the transatlantic origins of the core pair, however, the primary influences on the music are West African, combining classic rolling Malian ‘Tuareg’ guitar style with more urgent Moroccan gnawa rhythms and riffs. League apparently threw open his collection of African string and percussion instruments for this session, leading to grinding guembri bass lines and richly textured percussion. That said, History is ultimately a Western rock production, the songs often embellished with sumptuous Wilson-esque multi-vocals and flailing electric and steel guitars. League has said he wants to push instruments beyond their traditional roles and this, combined with Tirolien's conscious lyrics (helpfully translated in the CD booklet), make it a perfect fit with Real World's well-established history of global fusion music. The nine tracks are varied in mood built on catchy riffs that add up to a well-produced and very listenable whole.