Many felt fatigued by his ubiquity, his is-it-or-isn’t-it-vampiric energy, his cheeky Instagram captions, the questionable tiny tattoos he keeps adding to his constellation of bad ink. Using social media chatter as a litmus test, this year it seemed like the era of Peak Drake was finally coming to a Stone Island-outfitted end. “(No One Knows Me)” is about not getting choked in grief’s ashes. It gives true life to his personification of the piano, past weaker charges of nostalgic or simple emotional attachment. “You would show me I had something some people call a soul,” Sampha sings, as his fingers hit the keys with that very divinity. Sampha explores the contours of his sorrow without straying into the saccharine, knotted up with sadness, but moored in gratitude. “(No One Knows Me)” is spartan in its design, but not emotion. The song was conceived in Sampha’s childhood home, and has absorbed the grief of its setting: in a room upstairs above the piano, his mother, a woman who urged Sampha to pursue a career in music, spent her final days battling cancer. “(No One Knows Me) Like the Piano,” the record’s centerpiece, is Sampha at his most direct, and raw.
Process is an album of singular presence, not just in scope, but dimension: on his debut album, Sampha Lahai Sisay offers rich, lived-in metaphors, as messy as constellations pregnant with meaning, elusive, and utterly compelling. That’s just as important as articulating rage: we need to be in full command of both our senses and our sensations to clear the way for evolution.
These past few years, popular culture has shifted the dial on vulnerability, reframing the ownership of intimate feelings as strength. “Do you ever think about it? / Do you ever-er-er-er,” she softly sings over a skeletal, slo-mo R&B sound bed. Mhysa’s solo album fantasii, and in particular the song “Bb,” seeks to externalize these inner shores, like a magician pulling an endless string of silk scarves from her esophagus.
"I'm not letting go of my rage,” she told me this summer, “but I also need joy, desire - really to experience the full range of emotions because I am human and those feelings are inside of me, as they are inside of all of us.” When she’s recording as Mhysa, however, her sights are set elsewhere. Jane has been known to employ the full arsenal of contemporary club warfare sonics: serrated synths, sirens, agitated percussion. As one half of experimental electronic duo SCRAAATCH, Philly artist E.
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