Sampha

Sampha Lahai Sisay, born in 1988 in Morden, south London, the youngest of five brothers, to Sierra Leonean parents. Singer, pianist and producer. That cracked, weightless voice made him the most in-demand guest in British music before he'd released an album. He turned up on records by Drake, Frank Ocean and Kanye West, with Kendrick Lamar later. Process (2017) is his debut, and it's largely about losing his mother to cancer. It won the Mercury Prize. "Incomplete Kisses" is the album's second-to-last track, where the grief starts to resolve into something like release. Unexpectedly for such an interior record, part of it was cut at Ocean Sound on the Norwegian island of Giske.

From the notes for Episode 02 · fact-checked Oct 4, 2026.