Tempest and Carey have spent the last several years learning from the studio guru, using their time at Shangri-La trying to reconstruct the relationship between Tempest’s intricately polysyllabic verses with Carey’s post-dubstep productions. It’ll take a lot for them (or anyone) to release an album that means as much to me as Let Them Eat Chaos, but in terms of pushing themselves forward and continuing to grow – A Line Is A Curve is perfection.

Exit Strategy’ was produced by Bernard Butler and part-recorded here across Studio Three, the Gatehouse and Writing Room Three. In these more positive moments, Tempest can come across as mawkish; their style has always felt aligned with the heightened emotion of the American slam poetry scene, and This Line Is a Curve brims with chicken-soup-for-the-teenage-soul lyrics. While on the majority of their previous releases Kae was the sole performer on most songs, across this latest work they don’t only bring in big name guests but they also let them have starring roles and take some of the key moments on the album. It features guest spots from Grian Chatten, Lianne La Havas, Confucius MC, assia and Kevin Abstract. Beginning and ending with the same melody, the album’s cyclical structure mirrors the daily obligation to overcome our suffering and endure.The tension between the self and the collective is central to their work; so is narrative’s role in bridging those two realms. C.'s Grian Chatten, Lianne La Havas and Confucius MC, the album is out now via American Recordings / Republic Records and was mastered at Abbey Road by Christian Wright. In interviews, Tempest has described The Line Is A Curve as a more personal record and that is manifested visually from the outset, with their face adorning the album’s artwork.

I believe that at some point in the future, we will reflect on The Line Is A Curve as an important development in the career of Kae Tempest. Pitchfork may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. I Saw Light is an outstanding track, with its intimate feel creating an impression of Tempest and Chatten facing each other in an unfurnished room, lit only by a dim, bare bulb.

The track develops and unfolds magnificently, with dramatic, guitar-led sweeps, whilst all the while Tempest’s words increase in their urgency. The album attempts to capture what it feels like to be alive today in contemporary Britain, drawing on familiar signifiers and clichés: online lives, multiple jobs, youthful years drowned in pubs. To mark the occasion, we spoke with the man behind the masters of Matthew Herbert, Eliza Rose and Crass about his most memorable . Lianne La Havas proves to be an outstanding collaborator on No Prizes, her smouldering and soulful vocal perfectly contrasting with Tempest’s spoken word. The tight iambic trimeter of “Nothing to Prove”—ten lines of six slick syllables—sounds like bullets.

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. These lyrics seem to look back at Kae’s process of coming to terms with their true self, and the album’s focus on freedom, acceptance, and confidence shows them coming out of the other side. 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 material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast.For me, it is an absolute joy to see them putting out music that brims with such belief and confidence. Their second album, Let Them Eat Chaos will go down as one of the most original albums of this millennium. More Pressure, the penultimate song, is the essence of the whole album and the epiphany that leads to Grace, which is a prayer, a surrendering; ‘Please move me, please move through me, please unscrew me, please loosen me up. 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.