The long curls are gone, the "t" has been removed from the first name and the pronoun "sie" in English "she" has been replaced by the gender-neutral "they/them".

Kae Tempest has released a new album.

In addition to numerous volumes of poetry, plays, a novel and the essay "Verbundensein", which was published in German last autumn, it is now Tempest's fifth album.

The protagonists who populated the tracks like characters from a novel on previous albums have disappeared.

An I has taken its place - Tempest now seems to be talking about himself - at least a lyrical I.

Autofictional Spoken Word maybe?

Wolfgang Tillmans took the cover photo.

It shows Tempest with bare shoulders in front of a tree trunk with green leaves.

Unlike the tree, Tempest remains blurred.

The cover picture seems program.

But anyone who expects a pandemic navel-gazing now, after all, the album was created during the Covid times, is wrong.

Yes, the view of "The line is a curve" is inward.

The gaze goes inward

The tracks deal with feelings, vulnerability, self-exposure and self-knowledge.

"I'm neither your wife nor your sister/ I'm deeper / I'm here" it says, or it changes so beautifully from the laconic to the pathetic: "When I smoke I remember my mother smoking / There can't be healing until it's all broken / Break me".

There's a guitar strumming, there's a piano, there's the drums and synthesizers over and over again.

Above all is the unmistakable Kae Tempest voice with its unmistakably British accent.

You can call it rap, more like lecture or rap, but Tempest doesn't sing.

The much-vaunted anger in Tempest's voice has faded, and there seems to be room for collaboration.

For the first time on a Tempest album, other voices are heard.

Your own text in someone else's mouth.

Tempest once almost lost his own voice - four performances in one evening, alcohol, drugs, excess.

She then had to be rescued surgically: "My voice (...) My pass.

The one thing about me, as I saw it at the time, that made it okay for me to exist in public, considering all the things that I was - dyke, fat, bloke, unfemale, unmale, anxious, full of dysphoric shame" .

Voice and lyrics would have made it possible to escape from your own body.

Silenced after the operation, Tempest should have learned to listen.

"The Line is a curve" sounds strangely easy in everything.

As if Kae Tempest had thrown off a heap of ballast, all the politics that can otherwise be found in her texts, criticism of capitalism, gentrification, the suffering of the poor and disenfranchised, fade into the background here.

It's not gone, and that's good for the album.

Don't get me wrong.

Yes, anyone who is not completely unempathic is against poverty and heartless predatory capitalism.

shed ballast

And Tempest is neither unsympathetic nor cynical.

The only thing is that the whole social criticism in Tempest was sometimes a bit under-complex and is presented in the tone of a sermon, as in the essay “Connected” (Capitalism, competition makes us lonely, and only the power of creativity can save us).

Or ends in a signature under a call for a cultural boycott associated with BDS, which caused a long debacle in Germany, including a canceled appearance.

In "Spiegel" Tempest once again questioned the signature and considered having been too naive.

Even if the album slips a bit too heartily into pathos at times (the almighty power of love in the last track), the doubting, the questioning is its strength.

"I just wanna keep climbing, climbing / And I don't know why / I don't mind", it says and "You swim, you swim, / you hope to drown".

The ambivalence of feeling, the line that, on closer inspection, is actually a curve.