![]() ![]() But there’s a little bit of everything to keep it sounding fresh. ![]() (A notable exception is a well-utilized Smokey Robinson sample on “Two Worlds Apart.”)Īt 19 tracks and 65 minutes, Introvert is a lot to take in. The Simz we get on Introvert is the axis of a world that’s gorgeous and fully-realized - smokey lounge songs and free-wheeling jazz blurts and sounds that sound like samples but are usually not samples. (Simz popped up on one of those, NINE, earlier this year.) Previous iterations of Little Simz have included 2016’s Stillness In Wonderland, a Lewis Carroll-inspired fantasia, and the scrappy and sinewy GREY Area, which came out in 2019. For Sometimes I Might Be An Introvert, Simz has once again teamed up with her childhood friend and longtime collaborator Inflo, who most recently (purportedly) has been the mastermind behind the recent run of albums from the mysterious collective Sault. There are songs about her complicated relationship with her family there are a lot of songs about the pitfalls of gaining even a modicum of celebrity and the stressors that entails. It’s Simz’s most personal album yet but also her most removed, in the sense that it’s cinematic and surreal and overwhelming. “One day I’m wordless, next day I’m a wordsmith/ Close to success but to happiness I’m the furthest,” she raps on the album’s stunning opener, “Introvert,” amid militaristic drum patter and horn blasts that portend a grand arrival, an appropriate introduction to an album that’s teeming with different sounds and textures. These thoughts exist on record, too: “Why the desperate need to be remembered?/ Everybody knowing what you’ve done/ How far you’ve come/ I’m guilty, it’s a little self-centered.” There’s ego involved in being a musician and Sometimes I Might Be Introvert is the work of someone trying to figure out the balance between “Simz the artist and Simba the person,” as she says on one track. So why do we admire the people in the public eye so much?” There are all these people on the ground doing real work: the teachers, the healers, the preachers. “But I also wanted to pose the question: Why is legacy important? I want to be a legend, but sometimes I don’t know why. I know I am,” she recently said in an interview. Honestly, respectfully, I think I’m very very talented. But throughout, Simz wonders exactly why she wants to “make it,” occasionally doubles back and casts doubt on herself and her own abilities. It’s clear that Simz wants to be an important voice, and in many ways she’s succeeded. Sometimes I Might Be Introvert jumps around from idea to idea with the confidence of someone who has a lot of ambition. She expresses her alternating frustration and elation with the creative process. She puffs herself up a bit, understandably, and she also pays tribute to the community that raised her and the long lineage of those that came before her. On her new album, Simz takes stock of the ways her desire to be an artist has shaped her life - how it’s left her feeling disconnected but also invigorated. Introvert is heady and dense and restless - a masterwork, one might say, the definitive document of the musician also known as Simbiatu Abisola Abiola Ajikawo. On her fourth full-length, Simz has made her most accomplished album to date. Indeed, with a decade under her belt, Simz has made music that is consistently surprising and rewarding - she deserves applause. ![]() “I think I need a standing ovation/ Over 10 years in the game, I’m impatient.” So says Little Simz halfway through her new album, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert. ![]()
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