The Weight of Names
Sampha Sisay has always understood that names carry history. His debut album was called Process, a word that suggested both grief work and transformation, the slow metabolization of losing his mother to cancer. Seven years later, he titled his second album after his father, Lahai, a man who died when Sampha was still young and whose absence shaped everything that followed. The choice tells you almost everything about where he is now. Process was about surviving loss. Lahai is about understanding inheritance.
The distance between these two records is not just temporal. In the years since Process won the Mercury Prize in 2017 and made him one of the most celebrated British artists of his generation, Sampha became a father himself. That shift, from the child who lost his parents to the parent who must explain the world to his child, runs through every song on Lahai like groundwater. On Spirit 2.0 he sings directly to his son, trying to articulate what it means to be here, to be connected to something larger than your own brief life. The track is built around a sample of his father's voice, pulled from an old recording. The dead speak to the living. The living speak to those just arriving.
South London, Then Everywhere
Growing up in Morden, on the southern edge of London, Sampha absorbed the city's restless hybridism. UK garage, grime, dubstep, the electronic pulses that defined the early 2000s. He taught himself piano and production simultaneously, developing a style that never quite fit any single category. By his late teens he was making beats that caught the attention of SBTRKT, and their collaborations on tracks like Hold On and Wildfire introduced him to a wider audience. But even then, his voice was the thing that stopped people. Soft, almost conversational at times, capable of sudden devastating openness.
The features started arriving. Drake brought him in for Too Much, one of the most emotionally raw moments on Nothing Was the Same. Solange built entire sections of A Seat at the Table around his playing and singing, particularly on Don't Touch My Hair where his harmonies provide much of the song's ache. Kanye West wanted him for Saint Pablo. Frank Ocean recruited him for numerous sessions. And then there was Kendrick Lamar, who placed Sampha's voice at the center of Father Time on Mr. Morale and the Big Steppers, a song explicitly about paternal inheritance and the wounds passed between generations. The collaboration felt almost inevitable in retrospect. Both artists were circling the same questions.
But the features, however prestigious, also created a peculiar dynamic. Sampha became a secret weapon, the name that appeared in credits when artists wanted to signal emotional seriousness. He was present everywhere and somehow still elusive. Process changed that, establishing him as a headliner in his own right. Blood on Me announced itself with physical urgency, all pounding drums and paranoid momentum. No One Knows Me Like the Piano remains one of the decade's most devastating ballads, Sampha singing to the instrument his mother bought for the family when he was a child. The album won everything. And then he largely disappeared.
Time Moves Differently Now
The six years between Process and Lahai were not empty. Sampha contributed to more projects, played shows selectively, worked through the questions that would eventually become his second album. But he also experienced fatherhood, and that experience reorganized his entire relationship to time. Lahai is obsessed with temporality. How a moment passes but also persists. How the past lives inside the present. How a child changes your understanding of what came before you.
The album's structure reflects this. Songs bleed into each other. Tempos shift unexpectedly. The production, largely handled by Sampha himself with contributions from El Guincho and others, moves between gentle intimacy and sudden density. On Satellite Business he raps in a style he has rarely attempted before, the lyrics tumbling out in a rush of imagery that connects Sierra Leone to South London to somewhere entirely interior. Jonathan L. Seagull samples the Isley Brothers and features Yaeji, the collaboration creating something that feels like memory itself, warm and unstable.
The Sierra Leonean thread matters enormously. Sampha's parents emigrated from Freetown, and that heritage was always present in his life but not always foregrounded in his music. Lahai addresses ancestry more directly than anything he has made before. The name itself, traditional in Mende culture, signals this reckoning. There is a song called Dancing Circles that could be about romantic love or could be about the circular nature of family history, the way we keep returning to the patterns our parents established. Probably it is about both things simultaneously. That layering is what Sampha does better than almost anyone.
What Presence Means
The 2024 tour that followed Lahai's release showed an artist fully comfortable with the scale of his own ambition. Sampha has never been a natural showman in the traditional sense. He does not command a stage through force of personality. Instead he creates zones of concentration, spaces where the audience falls quiet and pays attention. The shows drew extensively from both albums while also incorporating unexpected covers and extended instrumental passages. Watching him play piano, you understand why so many artists have wanted his presence on their records. There is a quality of listening in his playing, a responsiveness to whatever else is happening in the room.
Where he goes next remains genuinely uncertain, which is part of what makes him interesting. The modern music industry rewards constant output, perpetual visibility, the algorithm demanding fresh content every few weeks. Sampha operates on a different timeline. He releases work when the work is ready, trusts that his audience will wait, and mostly his audience does. The critical reception for Lahai confirmed that patience. Publications that had praised Process returned to find an artist who had deepened rather than simply repeated himself.
The question of legacy haunts Lahai in ways both painful and generative. Sampha watched both his parents die. Now he is raising a child who will never know them except through stories and old recordings and, presumably, through the music their son has made. That circuit, from grief to parenthood to art, gives the album its extraordinary weight. When he sings on Only, the production stripping back to almost nothing, you hear someone who has thought carefully about what it means to be present in your own life while the people you love disappear.
This is not sad music exactly, though sadness lives in it. It is attentive music. Music that takes seriously the question of how we metabolize time. Sampha has made himself essential by making himself slow, by refusing the frantic pace that consumes so many of his contemporaries. In an era of perpetual distraction, he asks you to sit with him in the difficulty. Most of us, it turns out, are grateful for the invitation.
