Ms Banks – SOUTH LDN LOVER GIRL
Ms Banks has never lacked for candour, but on SOUTH LDN LOVER GIRL, she raises it to an organising principle
Opening on arpeggiated piano and sweeping strings, Banks speaks plainly about the psychic abrasion of moving through London as a second-generation Black African immigrant and woman: the mirror, the stare, the reflexive self-audit. Across the record, she stitches in broadcast soundbites on the political, societal, cultural and medical neglect of Black women; these reverberate as public record as well as album thesis, and the reference to the things said about MP Dianne Abbott lands with a grim, clarifying force. This device loses momentum, though, when those thesis statements give way to Banks’ own diaristic asides, where the message can feel spelled out rather than dramatised.
That directness is the album’s strength and also its limitation. NO LOVE and WHY? articulate the 'Black tax' and the imperative to remain composed under scrutiny with palpable, lived frustration, while WORK HARDER restates the old arithmetic of 'twice as hard' with weary clarity. Sonically, the palette can lack surprise. Even when afrobeat-inflected grooves arrive on THE ONE and IDK, they colour inside the lines – though the drum programming tightens and the low-end properly hits, lending the back half a physicality and weight the opening run doesn’t quite reach – and not always with the elegance to match its necessary urgency.
Listen to: CATCH YOU LACKIN', THE ONE