Lahai

Time behaves strangely on Lahai. Sampha’s second studio album arrived six years after Process, but rather than simply documenting what happened in the gap, it keeps folding generations, memory and the future into one another. The title is both Sampha’s middle name and the name of his paternal grandfather, immediately placing identity inside a family continuum. Across the record, rhythms skip and overlap while Sampha’s voice searches for ways to understand inheritance, love, grief and the speed at which a life can change.

Released in 2023, Lahai draws together alternative R&B, soul, electronic music, jazz and flashes of jungle without treating any of them as fixed destinations. Sampha worked with a group of producers including Ricky Damian, El Guincho, Kwake Bass, Kwes and Teo Halm, while contributors include Yaeji, Léa Sen, Sheila Maurice-Grey, Morgan Simpson, Yussef Dayes, Laura Groves and Little Simz. The personnel list suggests scale, but the album often feels remarkably interior, as though busy arrangements are following the movement of thought rather than trying to impress.

“Spirit 2.0” is a useful key, balancing intricate percussion with a vocal that seems to hover slightly above the beat. “Only” is more compact and direct, its repetitions giving the song an almost circular quality. “Can’t Go Back” makes the album’s concern with time explicit, while “Satellite Business 2.0” revisits and expands an idea with Little Simz. Sampha has discussed ideas around entropy and time in connection with the album, and the music reflects that fascination through structures that rarely move in a straight line.

Lahai reached number one on the UK R&B Albums Chart, but its pleasures are too slippery to reduce to genre success. This is a record where the drummer can seem to be arguing with the keyboard, where a voice becomes percussion and where a tender melody may appear inside an arrangement full of nervous motion. Its density is inviting rather than forbidding. The more closely you listen, the more its apparent complexity starts to feel like an accurate description of being alive among other people’s histories.