Sampa The Great — Nu Zamrock - ABC News & Headlines – Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Sampa The Great has long lived up to her name. 

From her AMP-winning mixtape and 2019 debut The Return to follow-up, As Above, So Below, she’s dug ever deeper into her African roots across ambitious releases.

And her latest does not disappoint. 

Nu Zamrock was shaped by the discovery that her blood uncle, George Kunda, was a founding member of pioneering Zamrock band WITCH, who fused psychedelic rock and African rhythms in 1970s post-colonial Zambia.

A conversation between the relatives is threaded through Nu Zamrock, which merges the titular genre with Sampa’s poetic hip hop and soul to stunning effect.

Backed by fuzzy guitars and syncopated grooves, Sampa raps her ass off, dishing out stylish, tough-talking bars on her most focused set of songs yet. 

“I got veterans wishing they had what I got,” she rightfully boasts on ‘Catch If You Can’ amid springy highlife guitars and beat-shifting percussion. 

She spruiks her skill and spiritual potency on ‘Prayer In A Dance’, and on the anthemic ‘Can’t Hold Us’, gives us another winning collaboration with her sister Mwanje Tembo.

‘Simon Says’ expresses her distaste for industry condescension with mercurial flow, and ‘Canary’ is a sweltering, psychedelic bite-back to those who’d confine her to a gilded cage.  

These are banging joints in the vein of career-best cuts like ‘Final Form’ and ‘Let Me Be Great’, designed to start a fire while also deeply thought provoking. 

On the interstitial 'The Journey Is Underrated', Sampa discusses how despite her plentiful successes — four ARIAs, playing Jimmy Fallon; soundtracking Black Panther, dazzling at Coachella and Glastonbury; the first artist to win the Australian Music Prize twice — she never measures her worth by career milestones. “A lot of the emphasis is on the destination or the shine, not the journey," she remarks.

‘Supernova’ is a surprise collab with Sia, showcasing her chandelier-rattling voice, before ‘STAR’ eases into sleek, swaggering funk with African-American artist KAMAUU.The sound softens in the album’s back-half without sacrificing strength, wrapping up with the hard-earned tenderness of the soothing ‘Gone’ and meditative closer, ‘I Can Love’. 

In the vein of recent works from Little Simz and Kendrick Lamar, Sampa has scaled back her scope, cutting through the conceptual grandeur to speak her mind more directly. 

But just as she brought fresh perspective to (historically white, male) Australian hip hop, Nu Zamrock offers a flavour and attitude distinct from anything coming out of the UK and US rap scenes.  

That’s all down to the 33-year-old reinforcing her cultural identity, embracing Zambia’s colonial-defying history into her artistic evolution with a purpose that’s palpably infectious. 

“You ever been global? You just in the States,” she scoffs on ‘Location’ amid the scorching licks of Gambian guitarist Bai Janha and the Lusaka-based iMitundu Choir. 

It’s a song confronting the inequalities between Africa’s enduring cultural influence and the Western-skewed global infrastructure that rarely supports it. 

Nu Zamrock connects past, present and (Afro)future into a bold fusion that creates space for whatever comes next. 

It's further proof that's she's Sampa The Great by name and by nature.