Elizabeth Sempa records as Mysie. She was raised in South London, her family is Ugandan, and she has spent the last six years quietly putting out the kind of project most singer-songwriters spend a career working up to. SALTY arrived in November 2025 — five tracks, twelve minutes, breakbeats and bass and a voice that does not need the production to do its work for it. That last sentence is doing a lot of work; the production is also extremely good.
She came up writing songs. Her debut EP CHAPTER 11 in 2019 was a folk-inflected thing. "Patterns" in 2020 sharpened the writing. JOYRIDE in 2022 was where the synths started showing up. Her CONTROLLA mixtape in 2024 is the bridge — that's where she stopped being a soul singer who occasionally used breakbeats and became a producer who happened to have one of the best voices in the country.
What SALTY actually does
The EP opens with "WISH I HAD ENOUGH" and you can hear the lineage immediately — Peshay, Nookie, Yaeji, Lone, Machinedrum — but the lineage is a base layer, not a costume. "CANNOT BE LUV" with Soxx is a duet about the last gasp of a thing both people already know is over. "DUN DI DUN" is the closest she has come to a club track. "NO MORE" is the centerpiece — the one where the breakbeat and the vocal are doing the same emotional work from opposite directions. "BITTERNESS" closes the thing out and the title is the entire essay.
The thesis
Thematically the EP is about disappointment — friendships, the music industry, the lingering taste of betrayal. None of that sounds fun on paper. The remarkable thing is that the project is not bitter to listen to. It is clarifying. There is a difference between processing something and complaining about it. Mysie knows the difference.
Start with "NO MORE". Then go back and listen to CONTROLLA top to bottom. The line gets clearer the further back you go.
Allastair Voss
