- With a characteristic lack of fanfare, British anonymous funk outfit Sault this week dropped Untitled (Rise), their fourth album in eighteen months.
There was no press release, no social media campaign, only absolutely minimal album artwork. Just 50 minutes of dance music and a hard political edge.
When Sault first emerged last year, it was with a kind of minimal funk, compared often to the classic New York, all-woman post-punk band ESG. That style began to expand with Untitled (Black Is), released in June, less than a month after George Floyd was infamously killed by Minneapolis police. That album was full of political spoken word, and a new, epic musical scope. Now Untitled (Rise) continues that trajectory.
The music on these two albums has been an exploration of black music in its many forms - from African tribal drumming to gospel, funk, disco and hip hop. Untitled (Rise) jumps rapidly through these styles, at times cramming each of them into a single song. The gospel theme is strong - musically, lyrically, and in a couple of social justice sermons inspired by civil rights preachers like Martin Luther King or Jesse Jackson.
Untitled (Rise) is certainly an album inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, with police violence as a recurring theme. I Just Wanna Dance is one example among many, with its lyrics of "I just wanna dance, makes me feel alive / I get kinda mad, we lost another life". It recalls the minor key disco and sly lyricism of Chic and it seems pertinent when protesters are regularly criticised for taking a stand, be they people on the street or celebrities using their platform. For someone with black skin in a racialised society, there is no "just dancing" - every activity and every moment is imbued with your otherness, a characteristic that even if you try to ignore it can be forced on you at any moment by someone else, like a racist cop. "Got to find a way out" the lyrics go on to say, "Why my people always die?"
Besides the funky rhythms and the political lyrics, the other fascinating thing about Sault is their committed anonymity. It seems likely the project is the creation of British producer Inflo, but why ruin the fun by digging too deeply into that? The idea of musicians remaining anonymous and shunning all the usual industry expectations is unusual in any age, but revolutionary today - when social media sees every person endlessly doing the routine of self-promotion as if our own selves are the new album we are trying to plug.
Anonymity in an age of surveillance can be a radical act, and not just in the power a masked protester gains from giving up their individuality to be a faceless part of the crowd. Sault as a musical project just exists - without the restrictions of an identity either created by itself or enforced on it by others. Freed from the limits of abstraction, it can explore the frontiers of its own potential.
Living in an age of racialised state violence, mass-surveillance, obsessive self-maintenance, technological alienation - hell, a time when going out to dance is illegal - Sault have made an album radically ripe for the times.
- Andy Paine.