Kae Tempest - Nice Idea

Choosing to spend precious time off the road to head into the studio might seem an exhausting idea, but there’s a breeziness to ‘Nice Idea’, four tracks Kae Tempest laid down with frequent collaborator Dan Carey last year - that suggests its genesis was akin to pressing the reset button. With as many literary accomplishments as musical to their name (one oh-so-often appended with a term like ‘voice of a generation’), here Kae’s flow sounds comfortable even at its most insistent, as slacker rock and jazz-inflected drum and bass backings mooch along. Tracks such as ’Thinking Clearly’ show their focus: “Uproar / But what I could really show up for / Is boxfresh kicks / And a Mark 4 Supra”. In fact, the only real stop-and-think moment is a deft musical construct in opener ‘Love Harder’. A track with a gloriously infectious, festival-field ready chorus (“When it burns brighter / A lover like me learns to be a fighter / When it gets darker / A fighter like me learns to love harder”), the breezy backing cuts out while Kae crams in the words, the silence amplifying their point: “It’s they/them / Or he/him also works…”