Since she was a kid, Simbiatu Ajikawo has had a low tolerance for disloyalty. There are quick quips lambasting snakes throughout her acclaimed discography, and even at eleven years old, she spit, “I’m Little Simz and I set trends/Don’t like liars/I hate fake friends,” when her older sister took her to rap at BBC’s Radio 1 Xtra. Her real breakthrough as Little Simz came much later, with 2018’s Grey Area, which was nominated for the U.K.’s prestigious Mercury Prize, then 2021’s Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, which won it. She followed that with No Thank You, which rebuked the music industry she was by all-appearances thriving in as something much darker and more draining than it looked.
Inflo – the musician who’s been tapped by Adele and Tyler, The Creator, and who’s shaped the mysterious collective SAULT with Simz and his wife, Cleo Sol – produced all three of Simz’s last albums. Simz has openly coveted her creative partnership with Inflo, a bond they began building when she was 9 years old. Then, in March, The Guardian reported that she was suing him, born Dean Josiah Cover, for allegedly failing to repay a $2.2 million loan – that went, in part, towards SAULT’s only live performance in 2023 – which she says eventually left her unable to pay her taxes and subject to penalties.
“Why do you steal? Why do you spill blood and then go hide?” Simz raps on “Thief,” the jarring opener to Lotus, her sixth album and first without Inflo in seven years. “Why do you take the rule book from people that hurt you and use it as a guide?/I’m lucky that I got out now, it’s a shame though, I really feel sorry for your wife.” The song thrashes like 1990s grunge and Simz is absolutely cutthroat on it, evoking the eerie menace of Kendrick Lamar’s whopping Drake diss “Euphoria.”
The public nature of her fallout with Inflo and how readily she tackles it on Lotus makes it a distinctly personal entry to her oeuvre – listening feels more like living in her skin than any project she’s done before. There’s a meta-allusion to the way she refuses to bury her truth under convoluted poetic flourishes when she tells Wretch 32 not to do the same on “Blood,” where she and her fellow British rapper trade bars as they portray siblings in a fight. Lotus is an excellent album, in part because songs like “Thief” and “Blood” are so uncomfortable, like peering at a nasty accident on the side of the highway and feeling more alive because of it. In the aftermath of an imploded childhood friendship, Lotus is a rigorous ode to the trauma and wisdom of truly growing up.
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Lotus is also an excellent album because of its deeply textured and expansive production, a satisfying victory given the circumstances. On “Lonely,” she frets, “Lonely making an album is tackling all doubt/I’m used to making it with [there’s censor beep instead of a name], can I do it without?” Yet, under new producer Miles Clinton James, all the album’s instrumentals are crisp, careful, and raw, whether they’re the rugged rock of the “Thief,” “Flood,” “Young,” “Enough,” and “Lotus,” the jazzy R&B of “Lonely” and “Free,” the stripped down acoustics of “Peace,” the softly orchestral lament of “Hallow,” the vintage Afrobeat of “Lion,” or buoyant bossa nova of “Only.” Where Lotus is fun, it’s unforced, and where it is grave, it’s understated. The album does retain some of the airy, gentle essence of Simz’s prior work with Inflo, Cleo Sol, and Sault, a band in which the latter two women were the defining voices amongst mostly shrouded collaborators. The similarities, though, feel like Simz staking her claim to a sound she was integral in pushing forward.
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Little Simz’s hard-earned sense of self-worth courses through the album. Much of her best rapping here blossomed from hardship – that, in fact, is what a lotus is, a flower that can bloom out of mud. “I know my mind is a textbook they can learn from even though I ain’t got a diploma,” she says on “Blue,” in the middle of a calm but relentless flow full of empathetic reflections on poverty, incarceration, family, and death. “Free” is a particularly moving trove of wisdom, expertly crafted with subtle foreshadowing between a cunning first verse on what love really is and a second on how fear threatens it. “I think that shit is a lethal weapon,” she says.
Though Lotus finds Simz rapping as victim and survivor, it’s filled with empathy for just how hard the human experience is, even for her tormentor, whose own pain she acknowledges. “I don’t expect you’re not flawed person/But thought you was good at the core person,” she says on “Hallow,” before reiterating an idea from “Thief,” that the real resolution she needs is internal: “I’m tryna forgive myself,” she says there. “I don’t need to forgive you so I can heal.”