The Line Is A Curve

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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.

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.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. 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. 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 every album they release there is at least one song that towers above everything else and makes itself the centrepiece and this time it is the hypnotic, mesmerising, and beautiful ‘Salt Coast. The pressures of maintaining relationships, of battling illness, addiction, poor mental health, the vacuous life of our online selves.

While on the majority of their previous releases Kae was the sole performer on most songs, across this latest work they don’t only bring in big name guests but they also let them have starring roles and take some of the key moments on the album.

Their second album, Let Them Eat Chaos will go down as one of the most original albums of this millennium. Covertly, it crept into the rooms, and the anxieties, of a group of neighbours in a London street at 4. 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.

These are an unquestionably more personal collection of words, particularly when compared to Let Them Eat Chaos, yet they are also more opaque. Tempest’s work is at its most profound when the cadence and rhythms embody those of the spoken word.Notwithstanding that, Tempest remains one of our most innovative and thought provoking artists and despite the occasional mis-step, there is plenty enough going on within this album to keep us hooked. The musicality becomes more expansive as the lyrical horizon broadens and we glimpse coastlines, high streets, scrap yards, train stations in the rain; the entire album begins to let go. 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. 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.

The tension between the self and the collective is central to their work; so is narrative’s role in bridging those two realms. 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. It’s a fascinating listen as a languid synth provides a compelling counterpoint to Tempest’s visceral rap.

If you’ve ever wondered what Kae Tempest would sound like if they’d been a performer in a 1920s jazz bar, then you should have a listen to ‘These Are The Days’, the song that kicks off the second half of their latest album The Line Is A Curve. 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.