<p><span><span>- I don’t think I have ever quite felt a wait like the five years between <strong>Kendrick Lamar </strong>projects. The Autumn of 2017 feels long past, and, in its dusty wake we finally arrive at the release of Kendrick’s new double-project <em>Mr Morale &amp; the Big Steppers</em>. My own life has changed in eighteen-hundred days and it feels like Kendrick’s has too. Gone is the saviour mentality towards rap and black culture, a burden that the Californian rapper previously seemed eager to put upon his shoulders.

<p><span><span><span>- The smoky, gentle smoothness of Allysha Joy’s sound is deceptive, because, really, she’s relentless. Even before the pandemic locks got knocked off the doors to international travel she was rattling the cage, raring to go. She’s out there right now, not touring her last record and its attendant clutch of remixes -on which the dust has barely settled- but flinging out a new one, even as she hits the stages across the UK. She produced this one herself, by the way. No filler either, no generic crap, as she says herself: “No love songs!