Glastonbury 2024 should have been an all-time high for Simbiatu Ajikawo. On the Saturday evening of the festival the rapper and producer better known as Little Simz took to the main stage to perform a kaleidoscopic swirl of songs that celebrated her dexterity as a rhymer, her gift for instantly catchy beats and her brooding, enigmatic stage presence.
Yet while the skies were largely sunny and the music cast a glorious spell, storm clouds swirled inside her head. She loved every second of her Glastonbury experience – but had to work hard to block out the negative voices.
“All this stuff was happening as I was about to play the biggest show in my career. Meanwhile, everything behind closed doors is insane,” she says from her home in London. “Trying to keep focus but having to deal with a lot of negativity is very, very, very challenging.”
Challenging was just the start of it. On stage she was notching up milestone after milestone: an Ivor Novello album-of-the-year award in 2020, for Grey Area; Mercury and Brit gongs in 2022; collaborations with Coldplay and Gorillaz; and endorsements from the megastar rappers Stormzy and Kendrick Lamar (“the illest doing it right now”).
In private, however, Simz was navigating a series of professional upheavals that had left her questioning her place in the industry – and whether she even wanted to carry on.
Twelve months later she is, to paraphrase Elton John, still standing. Having come through those hard times, she now unpacks her feelings on her extraordinary sixth album, Lotus – a downtempo blend of R&B grooves, indie-pop melodies and bruised, bluesy vocals that directly address her struggles.
“This person I’ve known my whole life/ Coming like a devil in disguise,” she intones over a descending bass line and bustling drums on the album’s opener, Thief, her rage intermingled with the sadness that is the inevitable consequence of learning, the hard way, that people can be trusted only so far.
Simz doesn’t name names on Lotus. Still, it is inevitable that the lyrics will be read in the context of distractions offstage, particularly a very public falling out with her childhood friend Dean Cover, aka the Adele producer Inflo, whom she is suing over what she claims is an unpaid loan of £1.7 million. (She and Cover have recorded several albums’ worth of material together that is unlikely now ever to see the light of day.)
Whether or not the songs – which feature guest turns from Michael Kiwanuka, Wretch 32 and others – are specifically about Cover, they pulsate with the sting of betrayal, the painful realisation that loyalty has its limits.
Does she feel she was too trusting of her friends? “You can mask it as loyalty, but it’s probably disbelief in yourself and feeling you’re in that situation because you also benefit from it somehow, because you don’t believe in yourself enough to do it on your own.
“Does that make sense? So you can mask it as loyalty. Loyalty is a thing. You can definitely be too loyal. It’s a lack of self-belief.”
Lotus is an album of light and shade, happiness and anger, bangers and ballads that crowns 10 years of hard work. Simz released her first LP, A Curious Tale of Trials + Persons, a decade ago and has successfully side-hustled as an actor, drawing praise for her portrayal of a single mother with big dreams in Top Boy, Ronan Bennett’s gritty London crime drama for Netflix.
“It hasn’t been rushed,” she says of her career. “I’ve taken my time, made loads of mistakes on stage and off. Had to better my performance and be able to do the work. So that when it’s time to get on the stage I know how to control it, I know how to own it.”
Simz grew up in Islington, in north London, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants. She was 11 when her parents separated, after which she was raised mainly by her mother, a foster carer.
She was the youngest of four – hence “Little” Simz. A shy kid, she discovered the transformative power of music at Mary’s Youth Club, where she met Cover and crossed paths with the future X Factor luminaries Alexandra Burke and Leona Lewis.
Simz always regarded herself as a positive person who saw the good in others. She is no longer sure if she is that individual. She’s been through too much, especially across the past year.
“You come into it seeing the best in people, thinking everyone’s down to see your vision,” she says. “I’ve always been the type that I want to win with the people I started with. Along the way people change. It is what it is.
“I definitely have found, now, a way to move in this industry. That obviously comes with time and experience. When I started out I was super, super trusting. I couldn’t read certain things.”
Simz’s big break arrived in 2021 with her fourth album, Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, for which she won the Mercury Prize for best British or Irish LP of the year.
The title is at one level a play on her name, Simbi. But she genuinely is an introvert, speaking in slow, thoughtful sentences that suggest a person who spends a lot of time in their own head.
She isn’t a shut-in: this month she curates the prestigious Meltdown festival in London and will perform with Damon Albarn’s Gorillaz on a series of dates celebrating the group’s legacy.
But nor does she spend every waking minute immersed in the industry. Asked if she has heard of the Irish rap trio Kneecap, she says that, though aware of the name, she isn’t particularly familiar with their music.
“Okay, Kneecap ... yeah, okay. They’re, like, a group, right? They did a film? Yeah, I did hear about them, actually – wicked.”
The starkest song on Lotus is Lonely, a stripped-to-the-guts ballad in which she talks about starting over on her own. “I was lonely making the album – attempted it four times, lost my confidence you wouldn’t believe,” she says, half-singing, half-rapping, in profound sadness.
“I was in deep isolation, man. It’s not the greatest place to be in,” she says. “But I always think there are reasons why we go through things. You try and understand that. It was a time in life, and it did pass.”
But it has been a journey. Feeling abandoned and stung by the loss of the unreleased recordings she had made with Cover, there were moments when she wondered if she wanted to carry on. Her work on Top Boy had brought widespread acclaim; if she wanted it, there was an alternative career as an actor. She says she gave serious consideration to walking away from music.
“When I was starting [Lotus] I was, like, ‘I don’t even know what I’m doing this for – why am I doing this?’ And I think when you don’t know your why or when, you lose the reason why you started doing this in the first place. I think that’s a dangerous place to be. I had thoughts about leaving it, doing something else, but I didn’t.”
It’s a cliche to describe an album as taking the listener on a journey. Yet that’s what Simz does on Lotus. There is lots of anger and despair but humour, too, as on the playful single Young, a hilarious eruption of punk-pop that sounds like a distant cousin of Wet Leg or Self Esteem.
Simz acknowledges, too, that amid her struggles there have been moments to cherish, such as going on stage at Croke Park with Coldplay last summer, to guest on their single We Pray.
“It was mad. I couldn’t even see the end of it,” she says of the Dublin stadium. She likens the gig to an out-of-body experience. “There were so many people. It honestly felt like a blur. I was present, and I remember looking around, looking at Chris [Martin].
“It still felt like this is mad. It was only one song. It’s not like I was on stage for, like, an hour, where, slowly, you can start to understand what you’re doing.
“It was, like, one song, three minutes long – bang, bang, you’re off, you know. You had to be present to that three minutes. But it was great.”
As she prepares to release Lotus – the name comes from the fact that lotus flowers can bloom in “muddy waters” – Simz tries to be philosophical. She’s been through hard times. Better days lie ahead. These are the beliefs that sustain her through the challenges she has been through and those yet to come.
“I always think there’s reasons why we go through things. You try and understand that was a time in life. I’ve turned a new leaf – taken the bad, turned it around and made it something positive. I chose to invest my energy into trying to make this record and doing something good with it.”
Lotus is released by Forever Living Originals and Awal
