What Peter Fox Does When Peter Fox Isn’t Looking

Peter Fox—real name Pierre Baigorry—had one of those years in 2009 that can’t be engineered twice. The album Stadtaffe gave Germany Haus am See and Schwarz zu Blau back to back, songs that somehow made Berlin’s grey daily grind feel like something worth standing still for. He’s been a fixture since, stubborn about his love for R&B, dancehall, and afrobeat in a pop landscape that mostly tolerates those genres at the margins.

Now he’s set the Fox alias aside and started a band with Sway Clarke, a Canadian R&B singer with Jamaican roots and a writing credit list that includes John Legend and Tinie Tempah. They’re calling themselves Ricky Dietz. The partnership has the structure of a good joke: Pierre has been looking for someone who writes and sings in English and is willing to handle the parts he finds tiresome; Sway, apparently, has no particular interest in production or the operational overhead of running a project. Two people elegantly delegating their least favorite responsibilities to each other.

Sway Clarke has a fantastic voice—warm and controlled in exactly the right proportions—and together they’ve released their first single, Lemonade Drip. Hopefully it’s the opening move in something longer. But I’ll admit it: somewhere beneath the genuine curiosity about Ricky Dietz, there’s still a quiet wish for a proper sequel to Stadtaffe—a record that knows exactly how Berlin feels at two in the morning, when the sky refuses to go dark and everything is slightly, permanently wrong. Maybe Pierre needs this particular escape hatch before he can go back to that. Maybe Ricky Dietz is how he gets there.