Having scooped the Mercury, BRIT and Ivor Novello awards for 2021’s ‘Sometimes I Might Be Introvert’, the highly talented Simbiatu Ajikawo takes another creative leap with her fifth Little Simz album ‘NO THANK YOU’. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. She smiled and said “Thank you” when she was handed the prize for Best New Artist at February’s BRIT Awards, despite being 12 years and four studio albums into a well-documented career. Larisha Paul from Rolling Stone felt that "Throughout the film, Simz settles into a lead role surrounded by other Black performers to not only reject praise provided by external validation, but also reject the harmful myth of the strong Black women that more often than not erases the sympathy of human struggle by discrediting emotions that don't line up with the preconceived narrative prescribed to them. My favourite song on the album is 'Broken', the lyrics are so thoughtfully placed and the samples are awesome, however the mixing on this track is so bad im not quite sure how it ever left the production stage, the high hats that run along the enture track are so sibilant that its painful at some points.

On Metacritic, which assigns a normalised score out of 100 to ratings from publications, the album received a weighted mean score of 86 based on 13 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim". MOBO Awards 2022: Little Simz, Knucks, Central Cee, PinkPantheress and Jamal Edwards among winners".On the "beautifully warped soft soul" of track nine, "Who Even Cares", Simz sings about on focusing her eyes towards the future with a subtle auto-tuned vocal. UK rapper/singer Little Simz follows up her 2021 Mercury Prize winning Sometimes I Might Be Introvert LP with her most detailed and enriched work yet entitled NO THANK YOU. In 2019, she described the writing process for GREY Area as like attending therapy—but without going “to sit on someone else’s sofa and dish out my issues to a stranger so they could charge me by the minute.

Dylan Green of Pitchfork noted how "fully relaxed" Simz sounds on track two, "Gorilla", which samples a Jurassic 5 bassline. Sometimes the production’s soft edges can belie the bite of the words, but overall it’s a pairing that brims with possibility. Often, NO THANK YOU sounds like a SAULT record fronted by Simz—see the gospel swells on “Broken,” or the slick, cool-as-fuck, plucked-bass bop of “Gorilla”—not only because of the palette of satin strings and funky drums, but because of the charming confidence and faith in collaboration that seep through, as they do on all of SAULT’s transformative records. It features a "wall of percussion" resembling "a marching band, West African drumming and rolling breakbeats".If 2021’s “Sometimes I Might Be Introvert” catapulted Simz into the big leagues, crashing into the top 5 of the albums charts, collecting Mercury Music Prize, Mobo, Ivor Novello and Brit Award wins and earning her the biggest live audiences yet in the UK and Europe yet, “NO THANK YOU” is yet another delicious left field turn for 29-year old Simbiatu Ajikawo.

Sleek, succinct and utterly propulsive, it’s Simz’ defiantly punk rock, two fingered salute to conformity and fame, and all the expectations and restrictions that come with.

Products labelled '*item fulfilled by Exertis on behalf of hmv' will be supplied to you directly by Exertis via their approved couriers. Despite being released at the end of the year, The Daily Telegraph declared No Thank You the best UK rap album of 2022, while Rolling Stone, BrooklynVegan and other publications also ranked the album highly in their respective year-end lists. Freshly reissued on vinyl for 2023 by Forever Living Originals, NO THANK YOU provides plenty of paths forward for this distinct voice. She has a lot of important stuff to say, and the world would benefit from taking the time to listen to her.