The Line Is A Curve

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The Line Is a Curve is their fourth album and their most grounded to date, with songs that blend electronic, pop-rock and hip-hop. The preceding track, Nothing To Prove, has the intensity and urgency of anything on Let Them Eat Chaos.

It’s a fascinating listen as a languid synth provides a compelling counterpoint to Tempest’s visceral rap. Stripped back, with acoustic piano and melancholic strings, it showed the world that here was an artist with more than one string to their bow. It features guest spots from Grian Chatten, Lianne La Havas, Confucius MC, assia and Kevin Abstract.

Carey and Tempest repeat this formula on The Line Is a Curve: As Carey’s synths brood, Tempest explores a whole poetry anthology’s worth of meters. The track develops and unfolds magnificently, with dramatic, guitar-led sweeps, whilst all the while Tempest’s words increase in their urgency.

But once we get to the end of Grace, and the album, we loop back to the start – to ‘Kiss off the day with a mute mouth. There are things I have to say about the fullness and the blaze/Of this beautiful life,” they rap on “Grace,” offering the album’s final words. Tempest has described The Line Is A Curve as a more personal record and that is manifested visually from the outset, with their face adorning the album’s artwork. It’ll take a lot for them (or anyone) to release an album that means as much to me as Let Them Eat Chaos, but in terms of pushing themselves forward and continuing to grow – A Line Is A Curve is perfection.

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. Grian Chatten has a stonking spoken-word verse on ‘I Saw Light’, Lianne La Havas’s vocals make ‘No Prizes’ a thing of pure beauty, Confucius MC takes ‘Smoking’ to a new level after a purposefully subdued verse from Kae, and Kevin Abstract is encouraged to hammer home the message at the end of ‘More Pressure. And just three songs later, with an inspiring chorus of ‘move, I’ll fight you till I win’, we have the closest thing to a club banger that Kae has released so far. All of this over one of the most carefully constructed beats of their career, each key change making the hairs on your arms stand up. 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.

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. The core of the record is that the pressures we face do not always have to be heavy burdens, but can be reframed; the more pressure a person is under, the greater the possibility for release. For everything I’ve said about new influences and more musical variety on this album, ‘Salt Coast’ is here to remind us that Kae is a poet at heart – it’s a lyrical masterclass, an inspiring story, an incredible moment of truth, another time when Kae chooses to tell us to try our best and accept when things go wrong.

I Saw Light is an outstanding track, with its intimate feel creating an impression of Tempest and Chatten facing each other in an unfurnished room, lit only by a dim, bare bulb. Online since 2010 it is one of the fastest-growing and most respected music-related publications on the net. The tight iambic trimeter of “Nothing to Prove”—ten lines of six slick syllables—sounds like bullets. Because no matter how much a person grapples with, realises, deeply understands, about life and their place in it, we still wake up in the morning back to square one. But as Tempest examines the stop-and-go motions of being, it also feels like they are asking what it feels like to be alive, period.

That’s what allows the voices to take centre stage and when it comes to Tempest’s work, the words really matter. Inevitably, this confidence in showing themselves stems from the well-documented trajectory of their personal life. Being more honest with the world and my community about who I am and letting go of some heavy heavy shame, which is a glorious thing.It’s a few minutes of magic that sits in the middle of probably the most exciting album Kae has released so far. These are an unquestionably more personal collection of words, particularly when compared to Let Them Eat Chaos, yet they are also more opaque. It is like a confessional as they communicate via a distinctive form of rap poetry that only they understand. 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. C.'s Grian Chatten, Lianne La Havas and Confucius MC, the album is out now via American Recordings / Republic Records and was mastered at Abbey Road by Christian Wright.