The Line Is A Curve

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Inevitably, this confidence in showing themselves stems from the well-documented trajectory of their personal life. 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. Kae Tempest is renowned for their narrative-led, socially conscious writings that span poetry and fiction, playwriting and music.

By contrast, some tracks on The Line Is A Curve do not succeed in drawing us in with quite the same impact, and that’s because they function in a fashion that is the polar opposite to both tracks discussed above. Lianne La Havas proves to be an outstanding collaborator on No Prizes, her smouldering and soulful vocal perfectly contrasting with Tempest’s spoken word. 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. The preceding track, Nothing To Prove, has the intensity and urgency of anything on Let Them Eat Chaos.It is like a confessional as they communicate via a distinctive form of rap poetry that only they understand. Tempest and Carey have spent the last several years learning from the studio guru, using their time at Shangri-La trying to reconstruct the relationship between Tempest’s intricately polysyllabic verses with Carey’s post-dubstep productions. It’s a fascinating listen as a languid synth provides a compelling counterpoint to Tempest’s visceral rap.

It chronicles the afflictions of everyday life and the pressure to overcome them—from the violent desire to dissolve into limerence (“Don’t You Ever”) to breaking patterns of generational trauma (“Smoking”)—and ultimately counsels that we make peace with our daily adversities. The album plays like a chronicle of pressures - the mind-numbing pursuit of a comfortable life, the eternal striving for more, the pressures of the city, the country, the times.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. 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 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. These general themes, of acceptance, resilience, surrender are also about where I’m at in my personal life, in my journey towards a greater acceptance of myself as an artist and as a human being. The album attempts to capture what it feels like to be alive today in contemporary Britain, drawing on familiar signifiers and clichés: online lives, multiple jobs, youthful years drowned in pubs.

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.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.

This is Tempest’s show, but musicians who have been playing with them since they first began gigging provide little smatterings of drums, guitar, tuba, cornet, and french horn. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.Beginning and ending with the same melody, the album’s cyclical structure mirrors the daily obligation to overcome our suffering and endure.