AS Dave notes, a few minutes into his third album, he became conspicuous by his absence for “a couple of summers”. Four years separate the boy who played the harp from his last solo album, the platinum-selling All We Are Alone Together. Perhaps more notably, it’s been two years since he released Split Decision, the collaborative EP with Central Cee that spawned Sprinter: not only the longest-running UK rap No 1 in history, but the track that finally did the seemingly improbable thing a UK track would do and became a hit in the US, selling a million copies and even winding up on Barack Obama’s Annual Playla. But instead of trying to capitalize on its US success, as Central Cee did – jumping on tracks by big names ranging from J Cole to Ice Spice to Jung Kook from BTS; The release of a debut album which was announced during a live NFL broadcast, featured a slew of American guest stars and ultimately wound up in the US Top 10 – Dave essentially withdrew from music.
It is, by any measure, a counterintuitive move, and anyone wondering why, or what he’s doing, will find some answers in the boy playing the harp. It opens with portentous-sounding organ and a couple of verses that do exactly what you might expect an artist in his position to do: rehash his vast success and wealth—he “already has a legend”, his home seems to have a “garden the size of Adam and Eve’s” and “a forest”—but it turns out to be a feint, both musically and lyrically.
The Boy Playing the Harp is a very muted album indeed, big on sparse arrangements, gentle piano figures and subtle pleasures: the restless, skittering beats and helium vocal samples that open 175 months, the quietly haunting vocal harmonies that appear in the middle of my 27th birthday. Some of its tracks run past the six-minute mark, while its poppiest moments – No Arms, which reunites him with producer sprinter Jim Legxacy, and Raindance, a collaboration with Nigerian singers TEMS – feel unreduced. And once the opening verses of history are out of the way, this is an album remarkably light on self-aggrandising swagger: To judge by the remaining lyrics, Dave has spent a significant proportion of the last few years consumed by a series of existential crises. “Why don’t you post pictures, or why don’t you drop music?” He advised himself at one point. “Or why not do something but sit and stress yourself out?”
Some of his issues are universal, the kind of thoughts that tend to plague people in their late 20s, that weird time in life where you realize you can’t be stopped by an adult, whether you feel like it or not. He spent a lot of the boy who played the harp going through the pros and cons of the arrangement, unable to work out whether it was something emotionally capable or not: “You should have children … don’t you feel like you’re behind?” He frets at the crestfallen selfish. The brilliant Chapter 16 is styled as a long conversation between Dave and Kano, the latter now a patriarchal figure in UK rap, whose career began when Dave was in primary school. It suddenly changes from discussing the music industry and the impact of sudden fame on your friends to Dave petitioning Kano, a contented family man, for relationship advice: the latter hymns the joy of exchanging “a silver porsche” for “leather max-cosi baby seats in the SUV”.
But he also seems to be conflicted about his career, worried loudly about whether his lyrics are socially conscious enough, and whether they have any impact even if they are, working himself into a state on my 27th birthday that he ends up asking if the world really needs to hear anyone who fits at all: “Why don’t you need commentators, we can leave that to sports / Just listen to the music, why do you need the thoughts of someone?”
The irony is that he already answered that question. An album full of self-examination by a rich and successful pop star might sound like a schlep on paper, but Dave is a fantastically smart, sharp lyricist, more than capable of making it work—the kid with the harp feels charming, rather than self-indulgent—like he’s technically skilled enough to make the album muted sound a bonus: it focuses on his voice and flow flow.
It is a point that is underlined when he finally shifts his gaze to Amazing and Fairchild, two tracks that emphasize his intelligence as a storyteller: the former traces a 17-year-old’s progress from drugs to violence to prison, while the latter slowly details a sexual assault, projecting from Dave’s voice to female rapper Nicole Blak, before burst into an explosion that is angry different that occurred in the hesitation Everard, and objectification of women of Hip-Hop: “I am complete, not better than you”. It’s embarrassing, gripping and powerful: all the proof you need that Dave’s doubts about himself are unfounded.
