- The Mercury Prize winner—one of the UK's best rappers—returns with a hip-hop tour de force focused on ruthless lyricism and soulful beats.
- The lead-up to North London rapper Little Simz's landmark fourth LP Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, was a long trail of crumbs punctuated by well-received singles like "Woman" and "Introvert." Just 15 months later, she barely let anticipation build for a week before dropping its surprise follow-up, No Thank You. The album rollout amounted to a couple of Instagram posts and some flyers pasted across London railway arches, and the rap innovator's refusal to conform to expectations encapsulated by her decision to swerve label conventions and drop the album on a Monday morning in mid-December. For Simbi Ajikawo, appeasing industry types and topping the end-of-year lists just isn't on the agenda.
Shaped by laid-back, old-school hip-hop drum sequences and jazzy instrumentation, No Thank You breaks away from the expansive, deeply cinematic feel of its predecessor's lengthy, interlude-scattered journey. This new one strips things back, from the muted, chopped-up vocal samples that provide the underlying melody of "Angel" to the prolonged percussion piece that wraps up "Silhouette." The instrumentals are inventive, but never over-the-top. No Thank You marks a return to Simz's roots, focusing on pure barring with the feel of a sharp, early, lyrics-first mixtape. After second track "Gorilla"'s grand orchestral opening, Simz neatly latches onto a smooth hip-hop beat that slaps with double-bass licks, spitting in freestyle-like flows that evoke images of a lonely SM48 mic in a North London block of flats—the visions that dominated earlier hits like 101 FM."
The spiky quality of those earlier records is all over this one. No Thank You sounds like an eruption—it's thoughtful and intelligently crafted, sure, but it's urgent, packed with reflections that feel like they've been bubbling under the surface for too long. Simz delivers unapologetically honest bars about the false, predatory nature of people in the music industry, referencing a reported split with her long-time manager in "No Merci" with the line "Everybody here getting money off my name / Irony is, I'm the only one not getting paid." Elsewhere, against "Heart On Fire"'s haunting, bass-driven beat, she raps, "Honesty between a seller and a buyer should be a given / But man I didn’t know you were a liar," delivered with a fierce, captivating openness that permeates the entire record.
Two long-time collaborators help Simz deliver these confessions. Cleo Sol's vocal melodies and Inflo's slick production are crucial to the album's soulful hip-hop feel, which gives the lyricist room to breathe and get things off her chest. In this sense, there are parallels with the 2019 album GREY Area, also produced by Inflo, while the expansive, strings-led motifs of Sometimes I Might Be Introvert come out in the spacious orchestral outros of tracks like "Broken" and "Heart On Fire."
The most striking element of No Thank You is Ajikawo's fierce venting, an unflinching soul-baring. An independent artist who expressed public frustration at career roadblocks like the forced cancellation of a US jaunt earlier this year due to the spiralling cost of touring, she critiques conventions and characters that have threatened her artistic innovation. These outbursts are peppered across a record remarkable in its density—the ten-track album runs for 50 minutes, with five songs surpassing five minutes in length and only one below the three-minute mark. Everything that was bottled bursts out of the floodgates, although penultimate track's hook—"Who even cares if they say anything"—radiates a considered, accepting, but never resigned, tone. Evidently, the previous 40 minutes of relentlessly honest lyricism has done the job. The result is one of the most punchy, lyrically explorative UK rap albums of the year.
Tracklist01. Angel
02. Gorilla
03. Silhouette
04. No Merci
05. X
06. Heart On Fire
07. Broken
08. Sideways
09. Who Even Cares
10. Control