In June 2020, three months into the first wave of Coronavirus, a four-foot high poster appeared on the north end of London’s Holloway Road. It showed the image of tower blocks and audio speakers, both monumental in aspect. Sprouting from the rooves of the tower blocks were clusters of pirate radio aerials. Affixed southwards, to catch the eye of northbound traffic, the poster was reference to that former culture—and on closer inspection an advert too for the 101FM playlist, launched on Spotify by the musician Little Simz.

Two and half miles or so south of the billboard was the family flat on Essex Road in which Little Simz had grown up, her school at Highbury Fields, and the St Mary’s youth club she attended. Hanging in the ether were the alternative sounds of the past. The poster was a metonym for travel in the present through the past.

Little Simz is a traveller, and a sonic one. The sample, ‘you can’t see us, but you can hear us’, ends her third album Grey Area—a reference to the pirate radio shout outs and call ins, and so too to the sonic modality of her work. While many of her contemporaries are led by the visual, her music resonates with the past and vibrates with politics.

Some of this we can attribute to being the youngest of four children, and her journeys through the musical memories of her siblings—through their enjoyment of grime, US hip hop, and afrobeat. But her music is of greater longevity than her age for other reasons too, because through her work flows a messianism, and an alternative political sensibility connecting London to elsewhere.

Winner of the Best Newcomer Award at the Brits 2022, her music is then (paradoxically) not entirely new. Four mixtapes, six EPs, and four albums pre-date that accolade, but her work is older still. ‘Young blood, old soul, Can I die once and be born again?’, she intones on her second Coronavirus project, the Drop 6 EP; and those words provide something of a key to her work. Her old soul comprises the storytelling of Nas, Kanye, Lauryn Hill, and Notorious B.I.G.; the timeless quality of Nina Simone, John Coltrane, and Billie Holiday. Her music evokes East Coast hip hop grooves as it does disco, funk, and reggae pasts.

On the album Grey Area, Little Simz namechecks Shakespeare and Jay-Z as contemporaries, but as a traveller through literature and art there is something of Montaigne and J. M. W. Turner about her too, especially in her empathic disposition. That is also partly explained by her social location. She grew up in a family home that took in foster children (her mother was a foster carer), and so she shared intimate social space with siblings from other walks of worldly life, distinct to those of her North London peers.

Back in Archway, at the top of Holloway Road, Simz’s Spotify cypher combines with the earlier ‘life support systems’ displayed on the poster, because while Simz’s work is characterised by travel, it is also concerned with the concrete struggles of the city. In ‘Leaving Wonderland’ at the end of her second album Stillness in Wonderland, she says ‘my people need me’. Having been lost in a marvellous musical hole, her return is to the reality of austerity London. Her subsequent music chimes with the aggressive immediacy of London life as she tells stories of racism, patriarchy, class, and interpersonal violence; of structural enslavement and the street life of young black men.

And this is more than critique, because the call ‘My people need me’ is an affirmation of presence, too, not limited to blood and direct kinship. She puzzles through her trauma so others can puzzle theirs. Alongside pain, she picks up vectors of happiness, joy, and excitement to animate her music. ‘[S]ometimes, as an artist, you feel like you need to draw from traumatic things in order to produce good art. I don’t think that should always be the case. It’s nice to draw from a place of happiness, or joy or excitement, and still be able to make something good’, she explains to NME. If Simz is Shakespeare, Jay Z, J. M. W. Turner and Montaigne, maybe she is bell hooks too. In her capacity for liberation, she’s certainly more Marcuse than Adorno.

And all the while she is an introvert. The acronym of her latest album, Sometimes I Might be Introvert, spells her name, Simbi. She is someone who would rather be heard and not seen. She finds affinity in the rich anonymity of sound, not the cheap trappings of celebrity. For the extrovert and narcissist, today’s pathologies of over-claiming and disregard, destructive forms of self-love, negation fed by likes and views in an economy of never enough, her introversion offers pause; a more contemplative mode of being; a shyer and more collaborative empathy with the world.

‘Though I’ve always appreciated solitude, Yeah, I’ve always been cool with bein’ lowkey, Don’t see me out here much, not me’ she raps on the track ‘You Should Call My Mum’. And being lowkey does not dampen her fire, but consolidates her bravery, and her openness to the world. It engenders vulnerability (not fragility) towards others. There’s great strength in vulnerability, she says to the NME; ‘so I persevered [with it] and I’m really happy I did.’