Little Simz: No Thank You review — surprise album secures rapper’s place at the top table

Little Simz has had a mixed year of triumph and setback. In April, the London rapper cancelled a scheduled US tour, citing its unaffordability to her as an independent artist. Meanwhile, prizes have been showered on her following her 2021 album Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, including a Brit award, the Mercury Prize and a Mobo award.

It is against this slippery backdrop of precarity and praise that her new album has been surprise-released. No Thank You is an unexpected gift in the season of giving whose title, puzzlingly, is a rejection. It teams her with her regular producer Inflo, aka her childhood friend Dean Josiah Cover. His lauded group Sault, which often features Simz as a collaborator, itself specialises in surprise releases. The most recent comprised no fewer than five albums that suddenly dropped in November, like a squadron of rebel fighters foxing the radar systems of the music industry’s Death Star.

Anger at record labels is a repeated theme in No Thank You. “I can see how an artist can get tainted, frustrated,” Simz raps on opening track “Angel”. A Prince-style pun follows in which slave masters are equated with labels who own a musician’s master recordings. From her first mixtape in 2010, the rapper has chosen to reject record deals in favour of self-releasing her music. No Thank You is the first of her five albums to appear on Inflo’s label, Forever Living Originals.

Record industry perfidy merges into wider themes of black pride and struggles against racism. “Broken” is about a set of black protagonists struggling to stay afloat in an ungenerous Britain of money troubles and mental stress, limned by Simz over a masterfully ennobling backdrop of orchestral soul. “Oh, please step aside if you’re not fighting the war with us,” she raps in “X”, accompanied by the rat-a-tat of a marching band and spiritual vocal harmonies from what resembles a ghostly choir of ancestors.

“Gorilla” is a charismatic exercise in rap braggadocio, set to strenuous orchestral fanfares and the charming lollop of a sampled Jurassic 5 bassline. It is the closest that this serious-minded album gets to levity. Simz is a fluent but entirely unglib rapper who delivers her verses in the intense style of one for whom every word counts. No Thank You confirms her place at the summit of UK rap, and also the single-mindedness that has driven her to reach it. It is an album whose gifts lie in refusing to toe the line.

★★★★☆

‘No Thank You’ is released by Forever Living Originals/AWAL