Nobody's Home
It isn’t so much the range of styles London singer-songwriter Bakar (born Abubakar Baker Shariff-Farr) covers on his debut LP, *Nobody’s Home*—it’s 2022; we’re all eclectic now—but how effortlessly he draws them together. He can rap gently over bedroom folk (“Noun,” “Change of Heart”) or shout over sloppy, chaotic indie rock (“Reclaim!”); he’s an earnest child of the diaspora (Yemeni, Tanzanian) out to represent his people (“The Mission”) and a regular, self-lacerating kid who, by his own admission, can’t stop messing up (“GP”). He is, above all, an exemplary product of his time, defined not by any single trait but by his plurality.
The singer-songwriter’s eloquent if uneven debut album is stamped with the sounds of north London – Winehouse, Blur – where he grew up