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. We encounter the contributions of artists who I love and admire, guest vocalists and instrumentalists, and so we defeat the sense of isolation felt in the opening track with a sense of deeply connected community. As lyrics that focus on making the most of what you have today, a key Tempest tenet, the sounds of French horn, cornet, and tuba create an increasingly claustrophobic cacophony that puts me in mind of a dark room, couples holding hands at candlelit tables, men in fedoras, women in ball gowns.

Notwithstanding that, Tempest remains one of our most innovative and thought provoking artists and despite the occasional mis-step, there is plenty enough going on within this album to keep us hooked.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. Their second album, Let Them Eat Chaos will go down as one of the most original albums of this millennium. It’s a daily operation to increase your resilience, cultivate a deeper acceptance, let go of what’s chasing you and lean in to the pressures.

That’s what allows the voices to take centre stage and when it comes to Tempest’s work, the words really matter.

And just three songs later, with an inspiring chorus of ‘move, I’ll fight you till I win’, we have the closest thing to a club banger that Kae has released so far. 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. The pressures of maintaining relationships, of battling illness, addiction, poor mental health, the vacuous life of our online selves. Starting from a place of isolation and dejection, Tempest ends with community-facing lightness and love. The tight iambic trimeter of “Nothing to Prove”—ten lines of six slick syllables—sounds like bullets.

Elsewhere, on “Priority Boredom,” where each verse is dedicated to its own vowel sound, the monotony of individualism is cleverly represented with congested “or” sounds: “Priority boredom/Gorging/Four courses/Forced absorption,” they spit, the words like slushy fruit in their mouth. Tempest’s work is at its most profound when the cadence and rhythms embody those of the spoken word.Now comes their fourth album, The Line Is A Curve, and pleasingly it marks yet another step forward. The Line Is a Curve is a sentimental, prophetic, mimetic, and worldbuilding work that blends moody electronica with elements of neo-soul and grimey hip-hop. To mark the occasion, we spoke with the man behind the masters of Matthew Herbert, Eliza Rose and Crass about his most memorable . 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.

These are an unquestionably more personal collection of words, particularly when compared to Let Them Eat Chaos, yet they are also more opaque. Next to these, there are album highlights such as ‘More Pressure’ (with Kevin Abstract) and ‘Nothing To Prove’ that are the most pure Hip-Hop songs on any of Kae’s four albums so far, no longer blurring the lines between rap and spoken word. Towards the end of that beautiful closing track, Tempest sings/says “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you/But if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you”. On 2019’s The Book of Traps and Lessons, their first Rubin-produced project, Carey reined in his sound, leaving more space for Tempest’s words. And it’s a very beautiful album, because so many people involved in making it are people that I’ve known and loved for a very long time.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. 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. The core of the record is that the pressures we face do not always have to be heavy burdens, but can be reframed; the more pressure a person is under, the greater the possibility for release. This album has a beautiful heart, there is so much love running through it and I can’t wait for people to experience it.