Dave: The Boy Who Played the Ukulele Review – It’s Clearer Than Ever What an Amazingly Skilled Rapper He Is | Dave

ADave notes that just minutes into his third album, it was clear he’d been gone “for a couple of summers.” Four years separated The Boy Who Played the Harp and his final solo album, the platinum-selling We’re All Alone in This Together. Perhaps most surprisingly, it’s been two years since he released Split Decision, the collaborative EP with Central Cee that produced Sprinter: not only the longest-running UK rap No. 1 in history, but a track that finally did the thing it seemed increasingly unlikely a UK rap song would ever do and became a huge hit in the US, selling a million copies and even It ended up on Barack Obama’s annual playlist. But instead of trying to capitalize on its success in the US, as Central Cee has done – where she has jumped on tracks for big names ranging from J Cole to Ice Spice to BTS’s Jung Kook; Releasing a debut album that was announced on a live NFL Championship broadcast, featured a slew of American guest stars and ultimately ended up in the top 10 in the US – Dave essentially withdrew from music.

It was, by all accounts, a counterintuitive move, and anyone wondering why, or what he was doing, will find some answers in the boy who played the harp. It opens with a portentous instrumental and some verses that do exactly what you might expect an artist of his position to do: reiterate his massive success and wealth — he’s “already a legend,” and his house apparently comes with “a garden the size of Adam and Eve” and a “jungle” — but that turns out to be a sham, both musically and lyrically.

The Boy Who Played the Harp is a very muted-sounding album indeed, big on sparse arrangements, gentle piano figures and subtle pleasures: the turbulent, swinging rhythms and helium vocal samples that begin 175 Months, and the quietly eerie harmony vocals that emerge midway through My 27th Birthday. Many of its tracks run longer than six minutes, while its most sublime moments — No Arms, which reunites him with Sprinter producer Jim Legxacy, and Raindance, a collaboration with Nigerian singer Tems — feel understated. Once the opening verses of “History” are over, the album becomes remarkably light on self-aggrandizement: to judge by the rest of the lyrics, Dave has spent a good percentage of the past two years consumed by a series of existential crises. “Why don’t you post pictures, or why don’t you drop music?” He berates himself at one point. “Or why do you do nothing but sit and pinch yourself?”

Some of its problems are universal, like the thoughts that tend to plague people in their late 20s, that weird period in life when you realize you’re undeniably an adult, whether you feel like it or not. He spends much of The Boy Who Played the Harp contemplating the pros and cons of settling down, unable to figure out whether or not it’s something he’s emotionally capable of: “You should have had kids… Don’t you feel like you’re left behind?” He is concerned about tense selfishness. The brilliant Chapter 16 is structured as an extended dialogue between Dave and Kano, the latter now a fatherly figure in UK rap, who began his career when Dave was in primary school. It suddenly shifts from discussing the music industry and the effect of sudden fame on your friends to Dave asking Kano, a contented family man, for relationship advice: the latter riffing on the joys of trading in a “silver Porsche” for “Max Cosi leather baby seats in an SUV.”

But he also seems conflicted about his career, worrying loudly about whether his lyrics are socially conscious enough, and whether they have any impact even if they do, leading to him reaching such a state on my 27th birthday that he ended up questioning whether the world actually needs to hear anyone rap at all: “We don’t need no commentators, we can leave that to sports /Just listen to the music, why do you need someone’s ideas?”

The irony is that he has already answered this question. An album full of self-examination from a rich, successful pop star might sound like a piece of work on paper, but Dave is an extremely intelligent, sharp lyricist, and more than capable of making it work — The Boy With the Harp feels sublime, rather than self-indulgent — just as he’s technically adept enough to make the album’s muted sound a bonus: he focuses attention on his voice and its perfect flow.

It’s a point underscored when he finally turns his gaze outward on Marvelous and Fairchild, two tracks that underscore his brilliance as a storyteller: the former traces a 17-year-old’s progress from drugs to violence to prison, while the latter slowly details sexual assault, shifting from Dave’s voice to that of rapper Nicole Black, before exploding in a wave of rage that takes various forms in… “incels”, the murder of Sarah Everard, and the objectification of hip-hop for women: “I’m complicit, I’m no better than you.” It’s shocking, poignant, and powerful: all the evidence you need that Dave’s doubts about himself are unfounded.