Little Simz, the rapper from North London born Simbi Ajikawo, is starlike in many ways, including a strict one: having dropped eight mixtapes since 2013, she burns off energy at a colossal, dangerous rate. A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons is Little Simz’s first full-length album, and it marks a change from the catholic, unfurling experiments in her mixtapes. This is a tense, terse concept album: The tracks roll forward in one dark, uniform palette, each providing a different answer to a single line of questioning, as laid out by Simz in the opening track. Technically, she’s phenomenal: She revs up almost off-handedly, like she’s jumping rope, and she seamlessly shifts in and out of her singing voice like Drake. Twinning her meter almost classically, she spits: "They told her women cannot call themselves kings/ They told her fame isn’t made for everyone."
The album that follows is, in effect, a snarling refutation. She might not be a king, but she is certainly a prince, with cosigns from Kendrick Lamar, A$AP Rocky, and J. Cole, among others. She’s got fame in her crosshairs, and likely the other way around, too, but the defining note of Trials + Persons is one of ambivalence. Simz seems engaged with the naysayers—"This the type of music that ain’t never gonna sell/ Well, you should’ve never ever told me that," she repeats, in two separate songs—but her real fight is within herself. At 21, she raps with a shapeshifting hardness and ragged sense of spiritual burden that brings to mind Lauryn Hill, and Kendrick too.
Trials + Persons was recorded for free in the London Red Bull studio, and released on Simz' own label, Age 101, a corporate liberation that allowed her to make this 35-minute debut essentially hit one reverberating note. With the bigger producers and broader hooks a label might’ve asked for—even a single bright major chord, just once—Simz, an explosively skilled rapper, could’ve landed straight in the center. But instead, she’s keeping her talent under her own strict control, which means, by one calculus, curbing it. Instead of an album spiked with a big banging single, she offers a looping, obsessively focused experience, with her words providing structure and the pulsing orchestral instrumentation coming second. With a few exceptions, like the unprocessed drums and whining electric guitar on "Full or Empty", the album is a fugue state, unbroken and undifferentiated. It’s dark, but not impenetrable; Simz’s charisma keeps it lit in here, like headlights barreling around the corners of a dark room.
As a writer, though, Simz is less virtuosic. The album’s language is intelligent but wholly straightforward, rarely witty and almost device-less; Simz always says exactly what she means. She’s an original in stance, then, rather than substance or specifics, turning over her central dilemma from different angles, switching between personas from song to song. In "Gratitude", she imagines herself stuck at home with children; in "Tainted" (her "Backseat Freestyle"), she introduces her character and then jumps into a voice of a stone-cold, dead-eyed, alpha bitch. "God Bless Mary" is dedicated to her aggrieved neighbor (though it carries that "Zion"-esque double reading), and it takes palpable effort for Simz to step outside herself; she can conjecture nothing about Mary’s life except the woman’s reaction to this record.
In a way, the album feels radically personal: Simz is her own primary subject, and as a result is necessarily exposed. But the soul of the album is abstracted. Other people are totally figural, practically hypothetical. There are almost no specific objects, no physical places, no set decoration whatsoever. It’s just curtains pulling back on a spotlight and Simz wrestling with her ambitions like Jacob with the angel, reaching no conclusions but activating something deep.
