The Line Is A Curve

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Tempest and Carey have spent the last several years learning from the studio guru, using their time at Shangri-La trying to reconstruct the relationship between Tempest’s intricately polysyllabic verses with Carey’s post-dubstep productions. It’s as though they have bumped into Yellow Magic Orchestra in Catford High Street and convinced them to become their backing band for this album.

The album attempts to capture what it feels like to be alive today in contemporary Britain, drawing on familiar signifiers and clichés: online lives, multiple jobs, youthful years drowned in pubs. Evidence that this increased self-belief has seeped into their music can be found in the presence of the guests on A Line Is A Curve. Starting from a place of isolation and dejection, Tempest ends with community-facing lightness and love.It chronicles the afflictions of everyday life and the pressure to overcome them—from the violent desire to dissolve into limerence (“Don’t You Ever”) to breaking patterns of generational trauma (“Smoking”)—and ultimately counsels that we make peace with our daily adversities. Elsewhere, on “Priority Boredom,” where each verse is dedicated to its own vowel sound, the monotony of individualism is cleverly represented with congested “or” sounds: “Priority boredom/Gorging/Four courses/Forced absorption,” they spit, the words like slushy fruit in their mouth. Even when the beats enter to accompany Confucius’ rap halfway through, they don’t detract from the core because we are already engaged.

Having developed a burgeoning reputation with a mix of sold-out headline shows, gigs supporting Kings of Leon, Inhaler, Pixies and The Reytons plus major radio airplay, we were thrilled to be part the band’s ascension and see such a positive reaction to the record’s . Products shown, tagged or featured on YouTube by creators are sold by merchants and are subject to merchant's terms and conditions. And it’s a very beautiful album, because so many people involved in making it are people that I’ve known and loved for a very long time.The theatrical ebbs and flows of their vocals on Salt Coast acutely capture the timely themes of “sleeve-pulling nervousness” caused by everything from Covid to micro-aggressions. That’s what allows the voices to take centre stage and when it comes to Tempest’s work, the words really matter.

C.’s Grian Chatten (whose verse on “I Saw Light” feels conservative and glib compared to Tempest’s incisive and intimate imagery) and former BROCKHAMPTON member Kevin Abstract, who was introduced to Tempest through Rick Rubin, the album’s executive producer.It’s a few minutes of magic that sits in the middle of probably the most exciting album Kae has released so far. Since making their live debut doing spoken word at 16, London-based Kae Tempest has made their mark across multiple disciplines: poetry, theater, fiction, and rapping. On 2019’s The Book of Traps and Lessons, their first Rubin-produced project, Carey reined in his sound, leaving more space for Tempest’s words. Tempest has a predilection for myth (in 2013, they released Brand New Ancients, a contemporary retelling of the tale of Tiresias), and their writing often argues for the importance of storytelling itself.

It features guest spots from Grian Chatten, Lianne La Havas, Confucius MC, assia and Kevin Abstract. To date, they have been responsible for three plays, a novel, six poetry books and a work of non-fiction. It is like a confessional as they communicate via a distinctive form of rap poetry that only they understand.

Lianne La Havas proves to be an outstanding collaborator on No Prizes, her smouldering and soulful vocal perfectly contrasting with Tempest’s spoken word.