For me, the album is about increasing resilience and raising your threshold for tolerance and acceptance.

To date, they have been responsible for three plays, a novel, six poetry books and a work of non-fiction. Next to these, there are album highlights such as ‘More Pressure’ (with Kevin Abstract) and ‘Nothing To Prove’ that are the most pure Hip-Hop songs on any of Kae’s four albums so far, no longer blurring the lines between rap and spoken word. On every album they release there is at least one song that towers above everything else and makes itself the centrepiece and this time it is the hypnotic, mesmerising, and beautiful ‘Salt Coast.

That’s what allows the voices to take centre stage and when it comes to Tempest’s work, the words really matter.

Starting from a place of isolation and dejection, Tempest ends with community-facing lightness and love. It chronicles the afflictions of everyday life and the pressure to overcome them—from the violent desire to dissolve into limerence (“Don’t You Ever”) to breaking patterns of generational trauma (“Smoking”)—and ultimately counsels that we make peace with our daily adversities. The Line Is a Curve is a sentimental, prophetic, mimetic, and worldbuilding work that blends moody electronica with elements of neo-soul and grimey hip-hop. As lyrics that focus on making the most of what you have today, a key Tempest tenet, the sounds of French horn, cornet, and tuba create an increasingly claustrophobic cacophony that puts me in mind of a dark room, couples holding hands at candlelit tables, men in fedoras, women in ball gowns.As the album progresses, Carey’s instrumentation becomes wider and lighter, and Tempest’s lyrics become more optimistic—“More grounded/More rooted/Less convoluted,” they rap on “More Pressure” over Carey’s euphoric, oscillating synth. In these more positive moments, Tempest can come across as mawkish; their style has always felt aligned with the heightened emotion of the American slam poetry scene, and This Line Is a Curve brims with chicken-soup-for-the-teenage-soul lyrics. The core of the record is that the pressures we face do not always have to be heavy burdens, but can be reframed; the more pressure a person is under, the greater the possibility for release. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. By contrast, some tracks on The Line Is A Curve do not succeed in drawing us in with quite the same impact, and that’s because they function in a fashion that is the polar opposite to both tracks discussed above.