Little Simz clearly believes in meeting situations head on. Her sixth full-length album kicks off, in every sense of the phrase, with “Thief”: unambiguously a lyrical barrage at her childhood friend and frequent collaborator Inflo, who Simz is currently suing for alleged failure to repay £1.7 million in loans for ambitious recording and performance projects.
It’s a topic she returns to on at least two other tracks on the album, going into quite some detail about her sense of betrayal and broken trust and the impact of this on her sense of self and creative process. It feels kind of bleak that this should be happening now, as Simz’s trajectory to date has been glorious. Year by year for the last decade she’s grown from relatively straightforward UK rapper to multi-faceted, genre-agnostic artist, each record more ambitious than the last and her profile growing accordingly. At a point where she’s just about to follow the likes of Jarvis Cocker, Patti Smith and Grace Jones in curating the South Bank’s Meltdown festival, to be so focused on the negative might seem a bit like a worm in the apple of her success.
However, it’s a measure of the kind of artist she is that it does not sour this album one bit. To start with, Simz’s commitment to the craft of hip hop lyricism means that her reporting on her situation and feelings are both elegantly musical and acutely analytical. It’s the same razor sharp skill that turns the rhyming mini-drama “Blood” – written as a brother-sister phone call, and performed as a duet with Wretch 32 – into emotional dynamite, and not the afternoon Radio 4 nonsense it could so easily have been. So it is throughout: no song is just one thing, the personal drama is just folded into it as one element among many, and the personal, the political, the celebratory and the confrontational all flow together.
On top of that, this album continues her musical growth so spectacularly, that sense of completeness also works across a radical range of sounds. “Thief” has a menacing, Lynchian rockabilly twang that builds to choruses of focused rage, but it somehow sits perfectly alongside the Afrobeat roll of “Lion”, the post-punk of “Enough” and the cheeky “Young” and the rich cosmic soul arrangement of the climactic title track – in which Yussef Dayes’s drumming alone is transcendent, let alone the way it meshes with strings, vocals and the rest. This isn’t just eclecticism for its own sake, either: it’s the sound of a visionary expanding to express her full story – and the sound of a world-class talent not only confronting conflict and mishap, but processing it into pure gold.
Listen to "Young::
