The Book Of Traps And Lessons

AlbumJun 14 / 201911 songs, 45m 3s95%
Poetry
Popular Highly Rated
9 / 10

The London writer and artist returns with another seething work of social commentary

Beauty squares up to ugliness on the South Londoner's latest; a tenderness that previously lingered on the edges of Tempest's work steps to the fore.

Madonna - Madame X

Kate continues to impress as one of the UK’s most vital voices.

While there are great moments, Tempest’s trembling delivery of certain words, with the intention of giving them an air of profundity, can quickly become tiresome

Stark, intimate, and crammed with difficult truths, Kae Tempest's third album holds up a mirror to reveal our most vulnerable reflections.

On The book of Traps and Lessons Kate Tempest wraps warm words around the shoulders of lives made wretched by those who breathe easiest.

The Book of Traps and Lessons is an album released with little context, or indeed, fanfare.

8.0 / 10

South London's Kate Tempest has been something of a revelation over this decade. The success of this spoken-word poet has been unparalleled in the UK, to the extent that she even received a fair amount of backlash from some corners of the Internet.

8 / 10

So far Kate Tempest hasn’t really made a wrong move. Her collaborations with Dan Carey feel like Bowie and Visconti or KRS-One and Scott La Rock,

(Fiction)

8 / 10

The empathy that’s soaked into Kate Tempest's comfortingly bleak music on new album The Book of Traps And Lessons is infectious.

9 / 10

When considering Kate Tempest's catalog of work, 2014's Everybody Down and 2016's Let Them Eat Chaos demonstrated the artist's penchant for profound...

Producer Rick Rubin has pared back the effects, giving Tempest’s songs about trying to love and dance through our current crises room to reach out

Album Reviews: Kate Tempest - The Book Of Traps And Lessons

Poet’s vivid third album is personal and political

8 / 10