Little Simz’s Lotus is the music-industry equivalent of a slash-and-burn harvest, where once-fertile land is razed and set ablaze, flooding the soil with nutrients. Earlier this year, the Mercury Prize-winning rapper sued her former producer and childhood friend Inflo for allegedly failing to repay a loan of £1.7 million (~$2.3 million). A majority of the money had gone toward funding an extravagant live performance by SAULT, the enigmatic collective led by Inflo and his wife, R&B star Cleo Sol; his alleged failure to pay back the debt left Simz unable to pay her taxes for 2024. Simz lost one of her oldest friends and her closest creative collaborator; Inflo had produced each of her three albums since 2019’s GREY Area. On Lotus, the fallout from the conflict becomes fuel for her creativity.
Simz started and scrapped four different full-length projects (each of which were worked on with Inflo) between Lotus and the release of NO THANK YOU in 2022. She has admitted to grappling with self-doubt throughout the album’s creation, but, emboldened by her trial, Simz emerges from the emotional wilderness spitting with a bristling intensity that manifests in a focus absent from her recent projects. With new producer Miles Clinton James at the helm of Lotus, she puts her interpersonal issues on display with a (sometimes) deft touch; it’s a thorough excavation of the graveyard of one’s ego and closest relationships.
On past albums, Simz’s topical scope has been vast, with varying degrees of success: she hip-fired at the music industry’s exploitation of Black artistry on NO THANK YOU and probed her psyche on 2021’s Sometimes I Might Be Introvert. Within those expansive arcs, the strongest moments were when Simz took aim at specific targets, whether external or internal. It’s that energy that makes the opener “Thief” an invigorating entry point. Post-punk guitars crawl in the background, giving the production a murky, forlorn atmosphere, as Simz lays into an unnamed malefactor, presumably Inflo, for his transgressions against her. Simz tells him that she feels “sorry for your wife,” calls him a “devil in disguise,” and accuses him of having no artistic direction until she came along. In the pantheon of diss tracks, it sits alongside Lauryn Hill’s evisceration of Wyclef Jean on “Lost Ones,” unflinchingly wielding familiarity as a weapon.
Simz has likened the new album to her diary, telling The Guardian “I really just put my life out there.” In the past, in her weakest moments, Simz would overload lines with syllables, her rapid pace washing away the meaning of her raps. Here, the intended transparency carries over to the way she structures her bars, as though it were just you and her in the room: “They ask why I’m starvin’ the streets?/This nigga tryna hold my shit up/I’ll never forget when you told me, give up/And that my big dreams were far from a reach,” she raps on “Hollow,” playing with the gas pedal to vary her delivery. Her plainspoken, tempered tone pops with personality, making her strongest musings land with the impact of an exploding bullet. When, over a sparse drumbeat, piano, and acoustic guitar (“Lonely”), Simz spits about being on the verge of quitting music, or reveals that paranoia has her peeking out the window like Malcolm X (“Lotus”), it all begins to feel like a therapy session that you can’t tear yourself away from.
James, who previously produced for the London-based band Kokoroko, handles all 13 tracks on Lotus. Largely forgoing the cinematic flair of Simz’s previous records, James surrounds her voice with unfussy arrangements that draw from jazz, Afrobeat, and rock. It’s a difficult balance but they manage, more or less. The overall lightness can make Simz’s musings on stardom and the industry to feel trite this time, especially when combined with her nursery-rhyme singing on the punky “Young.” The instances where James injects his beats with more gravitas—swelling strings set up a call-and-response with singer Lydia Kitto’s angelic chorus on “Only,” and pounding drums rattle like the soundtrack of an anxiety-inducing chase scene on “Flood”—suggest that their creative partnership has legs, even if they’re still finding their footing together.
What’s clear on Lotus is that Simz hasn’t closed herself off to the world. Cameos from Sampha, rapper Wretch 32, and Michael Kiwanuka (who has also worked closely with SAULT) raise the album’s ceiling, marking the welcome return of a collaborative ethos after NO THANK YOU. (“I love the idea of doing things as a team, you come with your people,” she told the BBC.) She sounds at ease in lengthy soliloquies on the way love and fear offer guiding lights after everything has gone down the gutter, and she comes across as unnervingly honest in the pantomimed sparring with a fraternal figure about their fractured familial ties. In a lesser artist’s hands, Lotus could have devolved into a messy confessional. Instead, Simz’s clarity defines this stage of her journey: she knows what’s behind her and she knows where to put her foot next.
