Little Simz: "Gratitude"

When Little Simz‘s voice touches down on “Gratitude”, you can hear the heart-flutters and determination behind it. She sounds like she’s auditioning in front of the world’s most important record executives, or facing down an adversary she’s spent years preparing to defeat. This sort of “risk-everything” conviction is a quicksilver, tricky quality to bottle: Sometimes you just get tiresome huffing and puffing. But the 21-year-old London rapper seems to exist naturally in that rarefied space where unholy resolve meets charisma, and so her goosebumps become ours.

“Give a fuck, I’m chosen,” she declares at one moment on “Gratitude”, adding at another “If I was in this position like a year ago/ I probably would’ve fell off like a year ago.” Kendrick Lamar himself, the keeper of this particular flame in pop music right now, has acknowledged her as “one of the realest doing it,” and on “Gratitude” this burgeoning-star aura leaps off the track like chem-trails. The beat is a processed babble of whispering voices, knotted and tense, but the chorus unclenches into a sigh, sung by the electronic soul duo the Hics.

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