On "Plastic 100°C," the opening track of Sampha's 2017 debut album, Process, the British singer-songwriter and producer was drifting off to space, at risk of coming too close to the sun. He sampled a transmission from Neil Armstrong taking our kind's first steps on the moon: "I'll work my way over into sunlight here, without looking directly into the sun." Sampha felt just as vulnerable, drawing a parallel with how his own explorations — into himself, his grief, his relations — might leave him burned, melted like plastic. "Houston, can you hear me now?" he sang in his rich, tremulous voice; forlorn with a lump in his throat, watching his ties to the world weaken and his connections to others cut out.
Process, with its wiry, fritzing production, communicates a system malfunction: the fear and anguish Sampha experienced during the period documented by the album. Three years before Process was released, Sampha moved back into his family home in Morden, a South London suburb, to serve as his mother's primary caregiver as she battled cancer. She passed away in 2015, and reckoning with her loss became the through-line of Sampha's debut, which went on to win the Mercury Prize and gave listeners a complete sense of the artist's exquisitely textured and emotionally vivid songcraft.
Lahai, Sampha's new album — which arrives a patient six years after his last — buzzes with that same brilliant kinetic energy; but, instead of threatening uncontrolled combustion or a burning heat, it harnesses all that power with grace, and marvels at the forces that spur transformation and keep everything in motion. "Deep thought on the speed of life / The sun's in perfect reach each time," Sampha beams atop the punchy syncopated drums of Lahai's second single, "Only" — whose music video shows the 34-year-old performing various acts of magic.
When asked about his work's frequent references to the celestial and the supernatural, Sampha tells Exclaim! over Zoom that they stem from the way curiosity shaped his mind as a child and how his thinking still follows similar trails of inquiry. "I find it a device to reimagine things or to connect to things in a different way," he says. "I feel like it's a different technology, or embracing the intuitive technology. And so, almost being humble in the face of the way the world is."
Intuition comes up several times in our conversation; Sampha credits it for the ways his two LPs ended up being connected, for the blend of musical styles that appears on Lahai (jungle, drum and bass, and broken beat add to his palette of electro-soul and alternative R&B), and for the prevalence of certain themes and images across his new songs. Lahai is filled with lyrics about flight, about birds and wings — and they find a perfect point of convergence in the album's spiritual centrepiece, "Jonathan L. Seagull," which is titled after Richard Bach's 1970 novella.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a fable that follows its eponymous bird's pursuit of perfect flight, as he's impelled by a contrarian belief among his flock that seagulls mustn't only fly for practicality's sake but should revel in the beauty and intricacies of flying. Over the vigorous, quickening flutters of "Spirit 2.0," Sampha sings, "Just like Jonathan Livingston Seagull / Try to catch the clouds as I free-fall" — and, according to him, this line emerged from freestyling. One of Sampha's four older brothers, Sanie, used to read him Bach's story when he was a child, but Sampha hadn't thought about it in years, until the reference swooped into his mind while recording.
"I feel like there's a point in which you notice yourself not writing anymore," he says, thoughtful about each of his words. "Like, if you come up with an idea that, yeah, that was a good idea, but I don't know how I came up with it. It's just that there are these points in which you recognize the well is just flowing. And it is a bit of a magical space."
Sampha's comfort moving within this space offers one interpretation of his flights across Lahai. When "Spirit 2.0" was shared as the record's lead single, a shimmering sense of levity marked it as a departure from Process's clouded paranoia: "Next thing I'm drifting into open sky / And I don't feel so scared," Sampha belts at the song's apex, strings swelling to the heavens.
"Inclination Compass," Lahai's barest track — built on piano chords so gentle they dissipate, at points, into whistles — imagines Sampha possessed with a bird's innate ability to head in the right direction. "Let's fly towards the source again," he beckons, and once he reaches the album's closer, "Rose Tint," he notices his inner compass pointing him towards family, revealing how he can drift from them when he gets "preoccupied with [his] own hurt."
"Looking back at it," he says during our Zoom call, "I see that music, for me, sometimes could be a bit of a manifesto of the things I should be focusing on — and doesn't necessarily mean I'm doing them. It's like my brain and my body are telling me that I need to focus on this, what's coming out in the music: whether it's fears, or the things that are paralyzing me from being more active in other parts of my life, or the reasons why I can't articulate an opinion on this subject."
Divining those messages isn't always simple, though; On Lahai, Sampha repeatedly finds himself swirling in turbid pools of introspection. "Suspended" launches him through splintered memories, their details flitting past at a dizzying speed. During the second verse, percussive keys scamper frantically, and Sampha's cadence mirrors their rising urgency as he breathlessly sings of being "In between the moments / Each one like sliding doors." The prismatic, turbulent and transportive nature of recollection depicted here squares with what Sampha says when discussing the ways his obsession with flight figured into Lahai: "I think it kind of fit into the ideas or the feelings of the record, which are quite impressionistic, in one way, but it feels like there's real-life source material — but then it's refracted through memory, or my thinking of memory, and memory's effect on time."
What the birds come to learn in Jonathan Livingston Seagull is that their true nature is one and the same as their idea of unlimited freedom, "as perfect as an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time." Sampha approaches this realization on Lahai, but to embrace and internalize it requires practice, continuous lapses back into an awareness of physicality's constraints.
"I can see a limit / I can see a body / I can feel a difference / A thing called time, yeah / I track it with the digits," he raps in staccato bursts on "Satellite Business." Cosmic synths whiz and glint beneath his hushed delivery; currents of static crackle, shedding light on why Sampha refers to his intuition as a technology — one that can help transcend what's commonly conceived as human limitations in some moments, but still faulty like any other. "I'm a bit more settled, in some senses, and patient," he says, when considering Lahai in relation to Process. "But I'm still human, struggling with being a human when existing."
Twice during our interview, Sampha worries his answers are running long; he pauses to note, apologetically, that he loves "to go off on a tangent" and that he gets "lost." But, in truth, his trains of thought are never tangential: the more he speaks, the more Lahai's constellation of motifs come to the surface and cohere. In the same way he surrenders to his streams of consciousness, he's "carried by a spirit" on "Satellite Business," one that returns him to a fading memory as if he's "back living in it." It's this kind of flight through time that leads Sampha, later in the song, to wonder, "Maybe there's no ends / Maybe just infinity / Maybe no beginnings / Maybe just bridges."
These bridges are found all over Lahai — when Sampha sings of his daughter's eyes providing him with the only evidence of the beyond he needs; in the album title that connects his middle name to his grandfather's first. The ability to notice them as paths to transcendence is something Sampha has taken great care to nurture, well aware as he is of potential obstructions.
"For me, it was finding that connection to have the perspective of sacredness or importance, just because, maybe, that's how things are," he says, cracking a smile. "If I deem them to be."
Process, with its wiry, fritzing production, communicates a system malfunction: the fear and anguish Sampha experienced during the period documented by the album. Three years before Process was released, Sampha moved back into his family home in Morden, a South London suburb, to serve as his mother's primary caregiver as she battled cancer. She passed away in 2015, and reckoning with her loss became the through-line of Sampha's debut, which went on to win the Mercury Prize and gave listeners a complete sense of the artist's exquisitely textured and emotionally vivid songcraft.
Lahai, Sampha's new album — which arrives a patient six years after his last — buzzes with that same brilliant kinetic energy; but, instead of threatening uncontrolled combustion or a burning heat, it harnesses all that power with grace, and marvels at the forces that spur transformation and keep everything in motion. "Deep thought on the speed of life / The sun's in perfect reach each time," Sampha beams atop the punchy syncopated drums of Lahai's second single, "Only" — whose music video shows the 34-year-old performing various acts of magic.
When asked about his work's frequent references to the celestial and the supernatural, Sampha tells Exclaim! over Zoom that they stem from the way curiosity shaped his mind as a child and how his thinking still follows similar trails of inquiry. "I find it a device to reimagine things or to connect to things in a different way," he says. "I feel like it's a different technology, or embracing the intuitive technology. And so, almost being humble in the face of the way the world is."
Intuition comes up several times in our conversation; Sampha credits it for the ways his two LPs ended up being connected, for the blend of musical styles that appears on Lahai (jungle, drum and bass, and broken beat add to his palette of electro-soul and alternative R&B), and for the prevalence of certain themes and images across his new songs. Lahai is filled with lyrics about flight, about birds and wings — and they find a perfect point of convergence in the album's spiritual centrepiece, "Jonathan L. Seagull," which is titled after Richard Bach's 1970 novella.
Jonathan Livingston Seagull is a fable that follows its eponymous bird's pursuit of perfect flight, as he's impelled by a contrarian belief among his flock that seagulls mustn't only fly for practicality's sake but should revel in the beauty and intricacies of flying. Over the vigorous, quickening flutters of "Spirit 2.0," Sampha sings, "Just like Jonathan Livingston Seagull / Try to catch the clouds as I free-fall" — and, according to him, this line emerged from freestyling. One of Sampha's four older brothers, Sanie, used to read him Bach's story when he was a child, but Sampha hadn't thought about it in years, until the reference swooped into his mind while recording.
"I feel like there's a point in which you notice yourself not writing anymore," he says, thoughtful about each of his words. "Like, if you come up with an idea that, yeah, that was a good idea, but I don't know how I came up with it. It's just that there are these points in which you recognize the well is just flowing. And it is a bit of a magical space."
Sampha's comfort moving within this space offers one interpretation of his flights across Lahai. When "Spirit 2.0" was shared as the record's lead single, a shimmering sense of levity marked it as a departure from Process's clouded paranoia: "Next thing I'm drifting into open sky / And I don't feel so scared," Sampha belts at the song's apex, strings swelling to the heavens.
"Inclination Compass," Lahai's barest track — built on piano chords so gentle they dissipate, at points, into whistles — imagines Sampha possessed with a bird's innate ability to head in the right direction. "Let's fly towards the source again," he beckons, and once he reaches the album's closer, "Rose Tint," he notices his inner compass pointing him towards family, revealing how he can drift from them when he gets "preoccupied with [his] own hurt."
"Looking back at it," he says during our Zoom call, "I see that music, for me, sometimes could be a bit of a manifesto of the things I should be focusing on — and doesn't necessarily mean I'm doing them. It's like my brain and my body are telling me that I need to focus on this, what's coming out in the music: whether it's fears, or the things that are paralyzing me from being more active in other parts of my life, or the reasons why I can't articulate an opinion on this subject."
Divining those messages isn't always simple, though; On Lahai, Sampha repeatedly finds himself swirling in turbid pools of introspection. "Suspended" launches him through splintered memories, their details flitting past at a dizzying speed. During the second verse, percussive keys scamper frantically, and Sampha's cadence mirrors their rising urgency as he breathlessly sings of being "In between the moments / Each one like sliding doors." The prismatic, turbulent and transportive nature of recollection depicted here squares with what Sampha says when discussing the ways his obsession with flight figured into Lahai: "I think it kind of fit into the ideas or the feelings of the record, which are quite impressionistic, in one way, but it feels like there's real-life source material — but then it's refracted through memory, or my thinking of memory, and memory's effect on time."
What the birds come to learn in Jonathan Livingston Seagull is that their true nature is one and the same as their idea of unlimited freedom, "as perfect as an unwritten number, everywhere at once across space and time." Sampha approaches this realization on Lahai, but to embrace and internalize it requires practice, continuous lapses back into an awareness of physicality's constraints.
"I can see a limit / I can see a body / I can feel a difference / A thing called time, yeah / I track it with the digits," he raps in staccato bursts on "Satellite Business." Cosmic synths whiz and glint beneath his hushed delivery; currents of static crackle, shedding light on why Sampha refers to his intuition as a technology — one that can help transcend what's commonly conceived as human limitations in some moments, but still faulty like any other. "I'm a bit more settled, in some senses, and patient," he says, when considering Lahai in relation to Process. "But I'm still human, struggling with being a human when existing."
Twice during our interview, Sampha worries his answers are running long; he pauses to note, apologetically, that he loves "to go off on a tangent" and that he gets "lost." But, in truth, his trains of thought are never tangential: the more he speaks, the more Lahai's constellation of motifs come to the surface and cohere. In the same way he surrenders to his streams of consciousness, he's "carried by a spirit" on "Satellite Business," one that returns him to a fading memory as if he's "back living in it." It's this kind of flight through time that leads Sampha, later in the song, to wonder, "Maybe there's no ends / Maybe just infinity / Maybe no beginnings / Maybe just bridges."
These bridges are found all over Lahai — when Sampha sings of his daughter's eyes providing him with the only evidence of the beyond he needs; in the album title that connects his middle name to his grandfather's first. The ability to notice them as paths to transcendence is something Sampha has taken great care to nurture, well aware as he is of potential obstructions.
"For me, it was finding that connection to have the perspective of sacredness or importance, just because, maybe, that's how things are," he says, cracking a smile. "If I deem them to be."
