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As Dave notes, a few minutes into his third album, he’s been conspicuous by his absence for “a couple summers”. Four years separate The Boy Who Played the Harp from his last solo album, the platinum-selling We’re All Alone in This Together. Perhaps more strikingly, it’s been two years since he released Split Decision, the collaborative EP with Central Cee that spawned Sprinter: not just the longest-running UK rap No 1 in history, but the track that finally did the thing that it seemed increasingly unlikely a UK rap track would ever do and became a hit in the US, selling a million copies and even winding up on Barack Obama’s annual playlist. But rather than attempt to capitalise 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; releasing a debut album that was announced on a live NFL broadcast, featured a plethora of American guest stars and ultimately wound up in the US Top 10 – Dave essentially withdrew from music.
It was, by any metric, a counterintuitive move, and anyone wondering why, or what he’s been doing, will find some answers in The Boy Who Played 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: reassert his vast success and wealth – he’s “already a legend”, his home apparently comes with a “garden the size of Adam and Eve’s” and “a forest” – but that turns out to be a feint, both musically and lyrically.
The Boy Who Played the Harp is a very muted-sounding album indeed, big on sparse arrangements, gentle piano figures and subtle pleasures: the unsettled, skittering beats and helium vocal samples that open 175 Months, the quietly eerie harmony vocals that appear midway through My 27th Birthday. Several of its tracks run over the six minute mark, while even its poppiest moments – No Weapons, which reunites him with Sprinter producer Jim Legxacy, and Raindance, a collaboration with Nigerian singer Tems – feel understated. And once the opening verses of History are out of the way, it’s an album noticeably light on self-aggrandising swagger: to judge by the rest of the lyrics, Dave has spent a significant proportion of the last couple of years consumed by a series of existential crises. “Why don’t you post pictures, or why don’t you drop music?” he admonishes himself at one point. “Or why not do something but sitting and stressing yourself?”
Some of his issues are universal, the kind of thoughts that tend to plague people in their late 20s, that weird period in life where you realise that you’re incontrovertibly an adult, whether you feel like one or not. He spends a lot of The Boy Who Played the Harp thrashing over the pros and cons of settling down, unable to work out whether it’s something he is emotionally capable of or not: “You should have had kids … don’t you feel like you’re behind?” he frets on the crestfallen Selfish. The brilliant Chapter 16 is styled as a lengthy dialogue between Dave and Kano, the latter now a patriarchal figure in UK rap, whose career began when Dave was at primary school. It shifts suddenly 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 pleasure of swapping “a silver Porsche” for “leather Max-Cosi baby seats in the SUV”.
But he also seems conflicted about his career, worrying aloud about whether his lyrics are sufficiently socially aware, and whether they have any impact even if they are, working himself up into such a state on My 27th Birthday that he ends up questioning whether the world actually needs to hear anyone rapping at all: “We don’t need no commentators, we can leave that to the sports / Just listen to the music, why’d you need somebody’s thoughts?”
The irony is that he has already answered that question. An album full of self-examination by a rich and successful pop star might seem like a schlep on paper, but Dave is a fantastically smart, sharp lyricist, more than capable of making it work – The Boy With the Harp feels fascinating, rather than self-indulgent – just as he’s technically skilled enough to make the album’s muted sound a bonus: it focuses attention on his voice and exemplary flow.
It’s a point underlined when he finally shifts his gaze outwards on Marvellous and Fairchild, two tracks that emphasise his brilliance as a storyteller: the former tracks a 17-year-old’s progress from drugs to violence to jail, while the latter slowly details a sexual assault, shifting from Dave’s voice to that of female rapper Nicole Blakk, before exploding into a burst of rage that variously takes in “incels”, the murder of Sarah Everard, and hip-hop’s objectification of women: “I’m complicit, no better than you”. It’s harrowing, gripping and powerful: all the evidence you need that Dave’s doubts about himself are unfounded.
