Sampa The Great: a rebirth with no room to breathe

Nu Zamrock is Sampa Tembo's third album, out 30 October, sixteen tracks long, and it never holds a thought for more than a couple of minutes. Tembo is a rapper who can sound certain and hungry inside the same bar. Here she spends most of the record being interrupted, often by her own sequencing.

The career explains the expectation. Tembo was born in Ndola in 1993, raised between Botswana and Zambia, and came up through Sydney and Melbourne: The Great Mixtape in 2015, Birds and the Bee9 in 2017, then The Return in 2019, which reached No. 12 on the ARIA chart and took Best Hip Hop Release, Best Female Artist and Best Independent Release at the 2020 ARIAs. In March that year she became the first artist to win the Australian Music Prize twice. She has been based back in Zambia since late 2020, where As Above, So Below followed in 2022. Each of those records had a centre; this one has a pulse and no spine.

The new record is built on hip-hop, rock, soul and funk pulled through Kalindula rhythms, and it is framed as a rebirth: confidence carried down from a lineage, a conversation between the past and whatever comes next. The release details name no producer and no studio. They do say that the past and the present are meant to be talking to each other. Mostly the past gets a word in and the track ends.

When the songs are allowed to run, the argument is strong. 'Simon Says' is the sharpest thing here, Tembo nimble over the beat while she takes apart the standards the industry sets for an artist like her, and the two minutes it gets feel like a decision. 'Location' is the album's most upbeat moment and its most political, a sermon on geopolitics and inequality delivered without a raised voice. 'Canary' goes the other way: moody, menacing, a claim staked for a new generation taking the room.

'Star', with KAMAUU, is the one that stretches out, swampy pulsating bass under airy harmonies, and it earns its three and a half minutes by refusing to hurry. 'Gone', with Nicole Gumbe, is the record's softest ground, Tembo tender in a way she has not often been on tape. Then there is 'Supernova', with Sia, a different kind of song entirely: bigger and cleaner, aimed somewhere past the front row, and the only track where the guest's presence tells you more about the strategy than the music does.

It is for anyone who has followed Tembo since The Return and wants the intensity without the editing. The record's ambition sits next to Santigold and W.I.T.C.H., and the Kalindula guitar lines reach for something like Fela's band-leading sprawl, but those names describe the intention more than the result. A listener who came for bars will find them; a listener who wants an album will keep reaching for the skip button and hate themselves for it.

The failure is structural. Six of the sixteen tracks never reach two minutes, and the short ones, which are not interludes with a job, simply stop: 'Intro', 'Prayer In A Dance', 'Can't Quit Music', 'Maybe Then', 'The Journey Is Underrated' and 'So Mone' each announce a direction and abandon it. 'Maybe Then' is the clearest casualty, a hook that arrives and is gone before it registers. Cut the fragments and the record is nine songs and a real argument. Keep them and a rapper with an exceptional run behind her sounds like she does not trust her own material to hold a listener.

So this is the low end of the scale, 1.5, and it hurts to write because the highs are not accidents. 'Simon Says', 'Location', 'Canary' and 'Star' would improve almost any record released this year. An album is not a playlist of those, though, and Nu Zamrock is a rebirth with no room to breathe. Tembo has another great record in her. This one gets in its own way.

The tracklist

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