Little Simz released "Sometimes I Might Be Introvert" in September 2021 on her own Age 101 label, an album built with such precision and emotional honesty that it won the Mercury Prize the following October. Born Simbi Ajikawo in North London to Nigerian parents, she has released music consistently since she was a teenager, building a catalogue across more than a decade without a major label deal and without the promotional machinery that most artists of her calibre depend on. The result is one of the most coherent bodies of work in contemporary UK hip hop.
ArtOnly: "Sometimes I Might Be Introvert" announces itself through its title before a single note plays. Where did that framing come from?
"I'm just very to myself and I didn't know how to really navigate that, especially coming in this industry where you're expected to have this extroverted persona all the time. I wanted to just let people know like, yo, I'm actually this way inclined. When it comes to business and my work, I'm not shy at all, I don't hold back with that. I'm very serious and direct, but other stuff sometimes." (The Guardian, 2021)
The title shapes everything about the record. The opening track, also called "Introvert," arrives as a full orchestral declaration. Strings and horns at maximum force, her voice at the centre of all of it. It is not the sound of someone retreating from the world. It is the sound of someone who has spent years understanding precisely who they are and decided to make that understanding the loudest thing in the room. The gap between the quiet she described as personal and the enormous sound she made out of it is not a contradiction. It is the point.
ArtOnly: You have described introversion not as limitation but as something closer to a superpower. Can you say more about what you mean by that?
"Introversion is my superpower, it's something that protects me and shields me. I am this way inclined but in the same breath, I'm not unconfident in myself. I'm very confident. I just know that I haven't got to necessarily be the loudest person in the room." (The Line of Best Fit, December 2021)
What she is describing is not shyness. It is a boundary, a deliberate means of managing energy inside an industry that treats constant visibility and output as the same thing. The album was made largely during the 2020 pandemic, which imposed on the world a version of what Simz had long practiced by choice. That context produced a record that is both intimate and architectural, personal in its confessions, immense in its production. When those two qualities exist inside the same body of music, and hold without collapsing into each other, the result is something rare.
ArtOnly: Inflo has produced all of your most significant work. What makes that creative partnership capable of working at the scale you two reach together?
"Our chemistry is just unmatched. We really understand each other in the studio. He trusts my ear and I trust his; we push each other. There's just the freedom to create and if it works, sick, but I think having the space to try new things is what I love most about working with 'Flo." (NME, 2021)
Inflo, the producer behind SAULT and a central figure in a particular strand of organic, symphonic Black British music, has known Simz since she was a teenager. Their working history runs long enough that it has developed its own grammar, a shared shorthand that produces speed and risk in the same session. When Simz accepted the Mercury Prize in October 2022, she spoke directly about what the collaboration had cost and given over time: "I wanna say a thank you to my brother and close collaborator Inflo. Flo has known me since I was so young, he's stuck by me, we created this album together. There was times in the studio I didn't know if I was gonna finish this record, I was going through all the emotions." (Mercury Prize acceptance speech, October 2022) The honesty of that moment matters as much as the award. It named what the record actually came from.
ArtOnly: You have operated through Age 101, your own label, for your most significant releases. What does that independence protect that a different arrangement could not?
"Throughout this whole campaign, I made a very conscious decision to be across everything and make sure that I'm telling this the way I want it to be told because it is my story. It's my name, I have to protect that." (The Guardian, 2021)
This is not a romantic position taken for its own sake. It is a structural decision with direct consequences for what her music sounds like and when it arrives. In December 2022 she released "NO THANK YOU" with no advance singles, no promotional campaign, no scheduled rollout. The title is a direct response to industry conditions she has consistently refused. The album received universal critical acclaim without any of the mechanisms most artists at her level depend on to generate that kind of reception. The choice proved itself.
ArtOnly: A collaboration with Damon Albarn for a Gorillaz track put you into a very different creative context. What did that experience teach you about how you work?
"I remember first getting into the studio with Albarn for the first time, and my anxiety just being through the roof like, this is mad. I felt myself trying to mold myself into what their thing was, and I remember Damon peeping it and being like, no, that's not why I called you in here. I called you in here because I want you to do that thing only you can do. And I think from that, I was just like, oh, OK. So every space I walk into, all I've got to do is bring myself." (NME, 2023)
The lesson she describes from that session extends far beyond any single collaboration. Her catalogue across fifteen years is consistent in voice not because she failed to develop but because she made a foundational decision early: arrive as yourself in every room and let that be enough. The Gorillaz studio confirmed what she had already built. It did not change her. It clarified something she already knew.
ArtOnly: When you took the Glastonbury stage in June 2024, you addressed the crowd with a very specific declaration. What was behind that statement?
"Glastonbury, I need you to understand that you are witnessing greatness. And I don't say that with arrogance; I say that with confidence." (NME, June 2024)
The distinction she draws between arrogance and confidence is one she has maintained throughout her career. Confidence, in her framing, is something earned through the work, not claimed ahead of it. "As long as I continue to be playful and have fun with what I'm doing, the evolution's naturally going to go to a place that I can't predict," she told Dazed in autumn 2023. And separately that same year: "I just have to remember who I am and who I was before all of this." (Dazed, Autumn 2023) The second sentence is what makes the first sentence possible. The playfulness, the creative risk, the willingness to keep going without knowing where the next album lands: all of it rests on a selfhood she has protected for fifteen years and refuses to let the industry erode.
Little Simz is the product of North London, Nigerian heritage, and fifteen years of deliberate uncompromised work. "Sometimes I Might Be Introvert" is the record that brought the widest audience to that work, but it is a midpoint in a catalogue that began with a teenager distributing her own music independently and has continued in that spirit regardless of scale. She does not separate who she is from what she makes. The Glastonbury declaration, the Mercury Prize acceptance, the surprise releases with no advance notice: these are not contradictions. They are all expressions of the same foundational position. She knows who she is, and she makes her art from there.
