This is Tempest’s show, but musicians who have been playing with them since they first began gigging provide little smatterings of drums, guitar, tuba, cornet, and french horn. Even when the beats enter to accompany Confucius’ rap halfway through, they don’t detract from the core because we are already engaged. For everything I’ve said about new influences and more musical variety on this album, ‘Salt Coast’ is here to remind us that Kae is a poet at heart – it’s a lyrical masterclass, an inspiring story, an incredible moment of truth, another time when Kae chooses to tell us to try our best and accept when things go wrong. The preceding track, Nothing To Prove, has the intensity and urgency of anything on Let Them Eat Chaos.

C.'s Grian Chatten, Lianne La Havas and Confucius MC, the album is out now via American Recordings / Republic Records and was mastered at Abbey Road by Christian Wright. It’s a fascinating listen as a languid synth provides a compelling counterpoint to Tempest’s visceral rap. Towards the end of that beautiful closing track, Tempest sings/says “If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you/But if you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you”. Now comes their fourth album, The Line Is A Curve, and pleasingly it marks yet another step forward.C.’s Grian Chatten (whose verse on “I Saw Light” feels conservative and glib compared to Tempest’s incisive and intimate imagery) and former BROCKHAMPTON member Kevin Abstract, who was introduced to Tempest through Rick Rubin, the album’s executive producer. Still, when Tempest decelerates the flow on No Prizes, the suspense and intensity fade away, leaving the track feeling a little empty. It was followed by something of a left turn in the form of the Rick Rubin produced The Book Of Traps And Lessons; an album that marked a surprising, yet unexpectedly welcome, departure from the visceral intensity of Let Them Eat Chaos. At the end of the impassioned chorus of first single ‘More Pressure’ Kae asks the listener to ‘Let Me Let Go’, and it really does seem that they have let go here – they feel less constricted, freer. Beginning and ending with the same melody, the album’s cyclical structure mirrors the daily obligation to overcome our suffering and endure.

It’s a few minutes of magic that sits in the middle of probably the most exciting album Kae has released so far. Tempest’s work is at its most profound when the cadence and rhythms embody those of the spoken word. It is like a confessional as they communicate via a distinctive form of rap poetry that only they understand. This album has a beautiful heart, there is so much love running through it and I can’t wait for people to experience it.It’s as though they have bumped into Yellow Magic Orchestra in Catford High Street and convinced them to become their backing band for this album. Stripped back, with acoustic piano and melancholic strings, it showed the world that here was an artist with more than one string to their bow. I Saw Light is an outstanding track, with its intimate feel creating an impression of Tempest and Chatten facing each other in an unfurnished room, lit only by a dim, bare bulb.

The musicality becomes more expansive as the lyrical horizon broadens and we glimpse coastlines, high streets, scrap yards, train stations in the rain; the entire album begins to let go.

In interviews, Tempest has described The Line Is A Curve as a more personal record and that is manifested visually from the outset, with their face adorning the album’s artwork. The tight iambic trimeter of “Nothing to Prove”—ten lines of six slick syllables—sounds like bullets. Being more honest with the world and my community about who I am and letting go of some heavy heavy shame, which is a glorious thing. There are things I have to say about the fullness and the blaze/Of this beautiful life,” they rap on “Grace,” offering the album’s final words. The theatrical ebbs and flows of their vocals on Salt Coast acutely capture the timely themes of “sleeve-pulling nervousness” caused by everything from Covid to micro-aggressions.