Lianne La Havas: Lianne La Havas [WARNER]

Why you'll love it

This EU pressing comes in a gatefold jacket with a lyric inner sleeve. The album won Best Album at the Ivor Novello Awards in 2021, and NPR Music called it her third and perhaps best.

This edition

• Gatefold jacket
• Lyric inner sleeve
• Pressed in the EU

About the album

Not many singers can say Prince once played a gig in their living room, but Lianne La Havas can, and she went on to sing all over his Art Official Age. The London singer-songwriter, raised in Tooting and Streatham by a Greek father and Jamaican mother, took five years after Blood to make this one, and it sounds like an artist who has worked out exactly who she is.

The songs follow a relationship from first bloom to its end and back to self-belief. "Bittersweet" opens with a slow-burning soul grandeur, "Read My Mind" and "Can't Fight" bounce along on supple grooves, and "Green Papaya" is sparse and tender. Her reading of Radiohead's "Weird Fishes" is a slow-building highlight. Beni Giles co-produced, Mura Masa stepped in as guest co-producer, and you can hear her love of Milton Nascimento, Joni Mitchell, Jaco Pastorius, Al Green and Destiny's Child in the mix. The guitar sits right at the front, as it does on stage, and her voice moves from a whisper to full gospel power without ever sounding like it's trying.

Her stage name is a phonetic spelling of her father's surname, which has spared a great many radio presenters a great deal of bother.

Also at Kops: more Lianne La Havas on vinyl · browse Hip Hop / R&B

Tracklist

Listen

On Warner Records, the 2020 album.