Kae Tempest – The Line Is a Curve
Fiction

Kurt Vile – (watch my moves)
Verve

“Salt coast, foul wind, old ghosts, scrap tin / Leaves, rain, leaves, rain.” Kae Tempest conjures a melancholy landscape on their new album The Line Is a Curve, a sequence of poetry performances over mostly heavy beats that seems to come out of the loneliness, enforced inactivity and general bleakness of the pandemic. Poet Kate Tempest – they came out as non-binary and changed their name and favoured pronoun in 2020 – remains best-known for their astonishing first book of verse, Everything Speaks In Its Own Way, and still more, for the theatre piece Brand New Ancients, which drew on religious mythology and atavistic ritual to pass comment on contemporary society and issues. Other hip-hop influenced works have followed, notably the Mercury Prize-nominated Let Them Eat Chaos, which exists in both record and book form.