The Line Is A Curve

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It might be a stretch to say that this process of coming to terms with and sharing their identity with the world has freed them up in their music as well as their life, but there are hints that this is how they feel on songs such as ‘I Saw Light’: ‘Heart is a yellowing brick/Dead set on a wish that can never exist/A transition/I want to be is but I’m isn’t. The preceding track, Nothing To Prove, has the intensity and urgency of anything on Let Them Eat Chaos.

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. 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.For everything I’ve said about new influences and more musical variety on this album, ‘Salt Coast’ is here to remind us that Kae is a poet at heart – it’s a lyrical masterclass, an inspiring story, an incredible moment of truth, another time when Kae chooses to tell us to try our best and accept when things go wrong. 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’s a fascinating listen as a languid synth provides a compelling counterpoint to Tempest’s visceral rap. Online since 2010 it is one of the fastest-growing and most respected music-related publications on the net.

At the end of the impassioned chorus of first single ‘More Pressure’ Kae asks the listener to ‘Let Me Let Go’, and it really does seem that they have let go here – they feel less constricted, freer. 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. Still, when Tempest decelerates the flow on No Prizes, the suspense and intensity fade away, leaving the track feeling a little empty. 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. 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.Even when the beats enter to accompany Confucius’ rap halfway through, they don’t detract from the core because we are already engaged. To mark the occasion, we spoke with the man behind the masters of Matthew Herbert, Eliza Rose and Crass about his most memorable .

For me, the album is about increasing resilience and raising your threshold for tolerance and acceptance.

Those moments when we are caught off guard; the occasions when the contrast between the music and voice is most stark. These are an unquestionably more personal collection of words, particularly when compared to Let Them Eat Chaos, yet they are also more opaque. 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. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement and Your California Privacy Rights.

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. But as Tempest examines the stop-and-go motions of being, it also feels like they are asking what it feels like to be alive, period. 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.Evidence that this increased self-belief has seeped into their music can be found in the presence of the guests on A Line Is A Curve. 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.