Lotus

Lotus begins from rupture. Little Simz had made some of her most acclaimed work with producer Inflo, but their partnership broke down amid a financial dispute that led Simz to sue him over alleged unpaid loans. She scrapped material made during that period and started again with producer Miles Clinton James. That context could easily have produced a record trapped inside grievance. Instead, Simz uses the break as permission to redraw the room around her, bringing jazz players, singers, rappers, strings and harder-edged textures into an album that feels restless rather than wounded.

Released in 2025, Lotus is Simz’s sixth studio album and moves between hip-hop, jazz, funk and punk-inflected abrasion. The guest list is unusually broad: Obongjayar, Moonchild Sanelly, Moses Sumney, Michael Kiwanuka, Sampha, Yussef Dayes, Yukimi Nagano, Wretch 32 and others appear across the record. Crucially, the collaborations do not turn it into a compilation. They alter the pressure around Simz’s voice, allowing her to sound combative in one moment and exposed in the next. “Flood” announces that physicality immediately, with a tense, gathering force that makes every entrance feel consequential. “Free” opens another side of the record, giving melody and space more authority, while “Young” carries a lighter energy without suggesting that the surrounding tensions have vanished. Clinton James’s production is important because it refuses one comfortable backdrop. Strings can sit beside clipped rhythm; live instrumentation can suddenly give way to something more skeletal. The changing palette mirrors a rapper reconsidering who she can be without a familiar creative partner beside her.

The title offers an obvious image of renewal, but Lotus is more compelling when heard as process rather than tidy rebirth. Simz does not pretend that change arrives cleanly. Anger, confidence, humour, distrust and pleasure can occupy the same record, sometimes the same song. That complexity is the point. Listen for how she adapts her delivery to each environment, and how the musicians around her create friction rather than simply decoration. The album’s scale is impressive, but its real strength lies in refusing to make transition sound simple.