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 folk-inflected. "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 is 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. The kick patterns come in hard on the downbeat where drum and bass would let them roll, and that choice alone changes the emotional character of the track. It is insistent in a way that grief is insistent, the feeling that keeps returning before you have finished processing it.
"CANNOT BE LUV" with Soxx is a duet about the last gasp of a thing both people already know is over. The breakbeat under that song is fast enough to feel anxious and loose enough to feel resigned simultaneously. That is a technical achievement. Most producers pick one. "DUN DI DUN" is the closest she has come to a club track, though it would be a strange club: too emotionally specific, too aware of itself, to function purely as movement music. "NO MORE" is the centerpiece, the one where the breakbeat and the vocal are doing the same emotional work from opposite directions, the production fragmenting at the exact moment the lyric describes falling apart. "BITTERNESS" closes the thing out and the title is the entire essay.
The Voice Inside the Machine
What makes Mysie exceptional in this specific territory is that her voice never gets swallowed by the production. This is harder than it sounds when the production is as busy as hers. The temptation, when working with breakbeats and bass, is to push the vocals back in the mix, to make them another textural layer. Mysie keeps her voice forward. It sits above the chaos with a clarity that makes the chaos more affecting, not less. You hear what she is saying. You feel what the beat is doing. The two things do not compete; they interrogate each other.
There is a South London quality to her vocal phrasing that is worth naming. Not the accent exactly, though that is present too, but a kind of emotional economy, a refusal to oversell the feeling, that comes from a tradition of music-making that values understatement as a carrier of truth. When she holds back, you feel the weight of what she is withholding. When she pushes forward, the contrast earns the moment.
Why Breakbeats
The choice to anchor the project in breakbeats is not decorative. Drum and bass and jungle carry a specific emotional history in British music: rave culture, the early 90s, a music made primarily by and for Black British communities at a moment of particular social pressure. To use that rhythmic vocabulary in 2025 is to invoke that history without necessarily announcing it. The listener brings the context along. The music benefits from the weight.
Sempa has talked in interviews about wanting to make music that is emotionally honest without being confessional in the way that contemporary singer-songwriters are expected to be confessional. Breakbeats give her a structure that is already emotional, already charged, so she does not have to spell everything out. The form carries weight she does not have to carry herself.
The Thesis
Thematically the EP is about disappointment: friendships, the music industry, the lingering taste of betrayal. None of that sounds appealing 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.
The Album Ahead
SALTY positions Mysie as one of the most interesting artists currently working in the space between UK club music and confessional song. The EP is five tracks. It does five things precisely. But it also opens up a series of questions about what a full-length album looks like in this mode, whether the emotional architecture can hold across forty minutes without the intensity diluting.
The precedents are there. Lauryn Hill built The Miseducation across twenty tracks without losing the intimacy. Sampha's Process sustained vulnerability at full-album length without becoming exhausting. Both did it through variety of approach within a consistent emotional register. Mysie has the range. The breakbeat production does not lock her into a single mode. The voice is strong enough to carry different material.
What will determine whether the album justifies the promise of SALTY is the same thing that determines whether any album justifies its promise: the quality of the songwriting at scale, whether she can sustain the specificity that makes the EP so striking across a larger canvas. The evidence so far says yes. The development from CHAPTER 11 through CONTROLLA to SALTY is a clear upward trajectory. The next step, the actual full-length that takes all of this seriously, is the record I am already waiting for.
The instrument she plays best is not the voice or the breakbeat. It is the distance between them, the gap where the emotional content lives, the space created when a powerful voice addresses a powerful rhythm and neither gives way. That gap is what makes SALTY matter. She understands it now. The album will show whether she can live inside it for an hour.
