Little Simz Announces New Album
Today, Little Simz returns to announce her new album. Sometimes I Might Be Introvert is due September 3rd via Age 101, and is the first full length from Simz since her critically-acclaimed, Mercury Prize nominated 2019 record GREY Area. Over the course of her lush, expansive, defiantly sprawling new album, Simz delivers an undeniable modern classic, effortlessly condensing any number of disparate styles and genres into music which thrillingly broaches the gap between urgent modern treatise and hip hop. A bold, quantum leap forward from GREY Area, this is hardly music aiming simply for the pop charts; rather, it is turbo charged with the kind of fury and potency, confusion and anxiety that make up the modern experience of being a black woman at this particular point in time. This is no mere philosophical exercise, however – the result is her most ambitious and soaring body of work to date, one which operates at the very heights of what rap can be.
Without wasting any time at all, the album opens with the heart stopping clarion call of “Introvert,” a visceral essay about lives lived in the cross-hairs of society, fueled by fear, exhaustion, frustration, but also a kind of white hot political awakening. It’s a full-bore, high-stakes, facing up to death riposte, as urgent as it is compelling, complete with a stunning video directed by Salomon Ligthelm of PRETTYBIRD which is by turns majestic and terrifying, with a chopped up, collaged structure perfectly mirroring the landscape it maps; a place of beauty and danger, of violence and dogged resistance. The center, Simz is keen to remind us, will not hold (“man it’s like they can’t sleep until our spirit is crushed”) – and here she is driven to document every unsparing detail.
