I am keeping it real this week with
Little Simz new LP,
Grey Area. Little Simz is a London MC who took her first turn in the recording studio at age nine. Now twenty-five, she has been lauded as a rising star in international hip-hop, catching roses in her teeth thrown by none other than Lauren Hill and Kendrick Lamar (while receiving favorable critical comparisons to the same).
Grey Area is her third LP and follow up to 2016’s ambitions Stillness in Wonderland, but with a decidedly more focused methodology this time around. Reaching the rip ol’ mile-stone of two and a half decades on planet earth has admitted produced a quarter-life crisis for Simz regarding her place in the world as a mother, artist, and activist. She mines the angst of her existential dilemmas in order to scrape up enough raw materials to forge into the toothy projectiles, a ten-round clip of incisive social commentary and self-affirming defiance that she titles
Grey Area. This is protest music, to the extent that the personal is political, and politics is constructed to keep the historically oppressed in line. It's all cream, from the ostentatious boom-bap of “Offence” which jukes-and-jives around stinging strings and flutes over an airtight beat, to the ground shattering grime-infused flow of the bassy “Boss.” The Kendrick comparisons are most appropriate on the juicy funk of “Sherbet Sunset,” while “Wounds” has a cloak-and-dagger reggae vibe to it, and the uncomfortable heat resonating off of the wandering spiritual “Pressure” is maintained with the help of guests, Little Dragon. Conscious, confident, and resilient in the face of both internal and external conflicts, I can’t get enough of
Grey Area right now!
Grab a copy of Grey Area on vinyl
here, out now on Age 101 Music.
