Process Review

The received idea about Sampha is that he is delicate. Process is not delicate. The percussion is aggressive, dry and forward, closer to electronic club music than to soul, and it keeps shoving against a voice that sounds one breath from collapse. That friction is the record. Plastic 100c opens on ambient dread before the beat kicks the door in. Blood On Me is a panic attack with a drum programme.

Kora Sings is stacked, restless, almost violent. Then (No One Knows Me) Like the Piano strips everything away for the best song he will ever write, a son addressing the instrument in his mother's house as a witness to a family that is now one person smaller. Nothing about it begs. He notices small things, the corner of a room, a hand on a key, and lets them do the work that a chorus would normally do. Ten tracks, no waste, no filler, and an emotional register earned rather than announced.