The 50 best albums of 2021, No 6: Sault – Nine

Nine – the fifth album in two years from the very prolific, technically anonymous and stunningly talented collective Sault – begins with a laugh. Unsurprisingly, for a record about fear, pain and trauma on the streets of London, it is a hollow one: a chorus of schoolchildren paying lip service to the concept of joy, their laboured, mechanical chuckling cut loose from a specific source. The effect is evocatively sad and bitterly satirical – especially after Nine’s primary theme, the way young people’s lives are marred by gang violence in the capital, becomes clear. But the sound is also hypnotic and strangely soothing. Or perhaps there’s nothing strange about it. “Laughter heals all that’s torn,” went the opening track of Sault’s last album, the Mercury-nominated Untitled (Rise).

Social injustice, structural inequality and headline-dominating racist violence: these are the subjects recent Sault albums have revolved around (the 2020 killing of George Floyd by a white police officer was repeatedly referenced on their third, Untitled (Black Is)). Much of the group’s lyrical content seems intended to disturb, a way to jolt white listeners out of complacency. But it’s not just condemnation – songs provide consolation too; they are also rallying cries for change. On Nine, spoken word interludes baldly state the reality of the situation – on Mike’s Story, a man called Michael Ofo recounts hearing the news of his father’s murder as a child; on Light’s in Your Hands, an unnamed speaker remembers fearing gang violence would suddenly break out on his way to school – while lyrics tell impressionistic stories that teem with loss and hurt, knives and guns.

The hope and the transcendence comes mainly from the music itself, which is as beautiful and as right as the world Nine depicts is frightening and wrong. Tightly melodic, luxuriously layered, instantly memorable without being cheaply infectious, it’s also gratifyingly hard to categorise – more so than on the outfit’s previous funkier outings. Genre-blending-and-bending is de rigueur these days, but not the way this lot do it: songs are puzzles, addictive in their unsolvability, a perfect balance of mismatched elements. London Gangs alone nods to the Chemical Brothers, grainily retro R&B, X-Ray Spex, hushed nu-folk and Auld Lang Syne. Bitter Streets is soulful 60s lounge music with a tricksy beat. You From London pitches Little Simz’s psychogeographical bars up into chipmunk mode over a track crafted from seconds of melody from the beautifully maudlin Bugsy Malone song Ordinary Fool. The exquisite title track is pared-back psychedelic soul, proggy folk, cosmic Beatles softened around the edges, and also none of those things.

It is unclear how many people it takes to make a Sault album, but in this specific case the major players seem to be north London producer Inflo and his partner, west London singer Cleo Sol (the American voices of previous records are largely absent here, except to laugh uproariously at English teeth and weather in the brilliantly droll You From London). The briefest of glances at Inflo’s CV explains the group’s multi-stylistic mastery. He started out working with the Kooks, and still mixes indie (Belle & Sebastian, the Snuts) with pop (Tom Odell, Adele’s 30) and rap (Little Simz, to whose work he brings a tactile, staunchly un-synthetic quality that is also present on Nine). He can make songs sound classic – he worked with Michael Kiwanuka on the timelessly beautiful Cold Little Heart (AKA the Big Little Lies theme) – or fizzingly new. If he doesn’t become one of this country’s most celebrated producer-songwriters very soon, it will only be because of his aversion to publicity.

On that note: if you like the sound of Nine, apologies. Sault only made the album available to stream and download for 99 days after its initial June release (now, the only way to legitimately listen is to buy it on vinyl). Quite why the band decided to remove this historically great album from the internet isn’t clear. It doesn’t seem like a way to generate hype via scarcity-principle gimmicks – especially seeing as you can still hear it unofficially on YouTube. Perhaps it’s a protest against streaming platform dominance, a way to get people to comprehend the value of an artist’s toil.

What the record’s disappearance does, however, is act as a reminder that Nine is not in fact public property. In a now-deleted Instagram caption about the album, the group said some of their members were from “the heart of London’s council estates”, where the majority “get trapped in a systematic loop where a lot of resources & options are limited”. The unexplained erasure of Nine feels like a kickback against the lack of agency foisted on those who grew up in such circumstances. It is an act of defiance – proof that if Inflo and Sol (and any other interested parties) want to tightly control the distribution of their work, that’s their prerogative. This precious, deeply personal and lovingly crafted album hasn’t gone away. It’s with those it really belongs to: the musicians who made it.