Few artists embody the tension between introspection and defiance like Little Simz. If her 2021 Mercury Prize-winning opus, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, was an expansive coming-of-age tale wrapped in lush orchestral splendor, her latest, Lotus, arrives as its grittier sequel. It is at once raw and personal yet bathed in a distinctly hopeful glow.
At thirteen tracks, Lotus is a slow-burning confessional that trades cinematic flourish for raw space. The orchestral interludes and baroque monologues of Sometimes I Might Be Introvert are gone, and so is the gospel grandeur of No Thank You (2022). They are replaced by sparse bass lines, brittle acoustic textures, rustling percussion, and the unmistakable weight of a voice that has seen something break and lived to narrate it. If Introvert was Simz' reflective mythos, Lotus is her in the dark and unguarded.
The rupture at the album's heart is real. In the time since her last record, Simz has publicly severed ties with Inflo, the elusive producer whose fingerprints were all over her previous three albums. Their relationship, long a cornerstone of Simz’s sound, ended in a tangle of legal disputes and bruised confidences. She has described it pointedly as a betrayal. And while she doesn’t name names on Lotus, the sense of fracture is inescapable. It's an album that feels like stepping into the pages of a journal frayed at the edges by rage, doubt, and, ultimately, hope.
"Thief," the opening track, is among the most direct songs Simz has ever written. Over grimy post-punk guitar stabs and a skeletal beat, she venomously spits: "I'm lucky that I got out, now it's a shame, though I really feel sorry for your wife... This person I've known my whole life coming like the devil in disguise." The line is cutting, accusatory, and, more than anything else, weary. Rather than burning a bridge, Simz chronicles its slow collapse, brick by brick, with no hint of theatrical vengeance. Such lines demonstrate Simz’s capacity to use specificity as an emotional blade, drawing comparisons to similar personal takedowns from Lauryn Hill. But where Hill's anger burned out in the open, Simz' is quietly smouldering. It’s the sound of someone too tired to perform rage but unwilling to let silence pass for peace. This weariness runs like a fault line through Lotus.
On "Hollow," she raps in near-murmur: "They ask why I'm starvin' the streets / This n**** tryna hold my shit up." Her delivery is slackened, almost confessional. It's here—and across the record—that Simz modulates her signature flow. The double-time bars and virtuosic syllable flips are still there but deployed sparingly, resulting in a cadence that is more conversational and intimate, earnestly sifting through pain to see what might still grow.
And grow it does. Much of this is due to Miles Clinton James, the Kokoroko band member who produces the album in its entirety. James crafts a leaner palette of restrained elegance. Its sparse jazz chords, live drums, and melancholic pianos are bathed in the warmth of analogue funk and afrobeat. Tracks like "Only," featuring Lydia Kitto, shine with muted soul. Others, like "Flood," summon restless energy with the help of Obongjayar and Moonchild Sanelly—their voices swirling around Simz in bursts that recall ATliens-era Outkast in urgent density or the exploratory fervor of Erykah Badu’s Worldwide Underground.
But even at its most animated, Lotus feels interior. Nowhere is this clearer than on "Lonely," a song that could easily tilt toward melodrama. But Simz' voice remains steady, while the arrangement is minimalist, featuring only piano, some guitar, and space. She admits plainly that she nearly walked away from music. The starkness of the confession is stunning in its calmness, allowing us to overhear her as she comes to terms with it.
Thematically, Lotus is steeped in dualities: strength and fragility, silence and noise, isolation and communion. This tension is enacted through collaborations that feel like dialogues best represented by Michael Kiwanuka and Yussef Dayes, elevating the title track into a secular prayer. A moment of grace where Simz acknowledges fear, doubt, and paranoia yet still chooses forward motion.
In "Peace," the joint contributions of Moses Sumney and Miraa May add depth to Simz' meditations on serenity and estrangement. Similarly, "Blue," the album's closer with Sampha, is a stunning dissolution. Over ghostly keys, Simz acknowledges the solitude that often follows clarity: "It's lonely at the top, but not the way they described it."
Even the most stylistically playful track, "Young," doesn't escape the shadow of the record. Built on jagged punk guitars and skipping drums, the track flirts with bratty sarcasm, but underneath lies a sharper critique. Simz channels her inner Poly Styrene, mocking an industry that wants her to be digestible, smiling, and silent. Delivered in a sing-song taunt, its refrain is equal parts satire and self-defense. If the album has an anthem, it might be this.
It’s in this refusal that Lotus achieves its cultural weight. Simz has continuously operated at a slight remove from the UK rap mainstream. Never quite grime, never fully soul, never easily boxed in. She's more akin to polymathic artists like Dev Hynes, whose genre fluidity is matched by their instinct for conceptual coherence. Her restraint here recalls the cinematic stillness of Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, itself a work of atmosphere, intimacy, and Black interiority. But she also edges closer to something more literary and psychological, with echoes of Audre Lorde and Virginia Woolf—women who wrote from within silence and understood that the personal was never just personal.
And yet, Simz is also entirely of her moment. In an industry that commodifies trauma and sells it back as empowerment (especially for Black artists), Lotus resists the tidy narrative arc. It doesn’t offer a resolution. It invites recognition. Her role in Top Boy as Shelley—a character trying to escape cycles of violence while running a nail salon—mirrors this subtly. It’s a performance grounded in emotional realism, mirroring her lyrical approach of speaking softly but carrying everything.
With confidence in refusal, Simz doesn’t beg for attention or push for grandeur. Instead, she carves a sonic chiaroscuro where shade is as meaningful as light. "I found my voice in the quiet of the storm," she says on "Free," a line that can be the entire album's thesis.
With Lotus, Little Simz doesn’t just survive upheaval. She shapes it, lets it breathe, and then blooms it whole. Like its namesake flower, the album rises quietly and without permission. As she confidently asserts her place among her generation’s vital storytellers, it may be her most radical gesture yet.
