Six years after his Processcrowned with the Mercury Prize, the British singer-songwriter Sampha Lahai Sisay once again borders on the sublime with this complex second album, in the existential and/or metaphysical themes addressed as much as in the music which carries them like the wind on the wings of the gull by Richard Bach, whose work Jonathan Livingston Seagull: A Story is cited throughout the songs. Contrasting the sound of his softly scratchy voice to that of breakbeats nervous, but always served with delicacy, Sampha structures his album around minimalist piano motifs, harmonies inherited from jazz and clever sound manipulations imagined in the studio. Sophisticated, Lahai thus transcends the categories of soul, contemporary music, electro, hip-hop — on the remarkable Only, elsewhere in his way of transforming his prosody in the same song – to offer a work that is both intimate, but universal through the big questions that he sings in the company of a few collaborators, including Yaeji and Lisa-Kaindé Diaz (Ibeyi).
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