Album Review: Chapter 1 by SAULT
The anonymous British collective builds an album from affirmations, prayers, and warnings designed to be said out loud until they sink in. Whether this sounds like medicine depends on your mood.
If you know anything about SAULT, they don’t do interviews. They don’t do photo shoots. For years, the British collective—anchored by producer Inflo, has released music with almost no promotion, no faces attached, no origin story to sell. It’s philosophy that the songs belong to whoever needs them, and the people who made them would rather stay out of the way. Since 2019, SAULT has dropped nearly a dozen albums spanning funk, gospel, orchestral ambience, and protest soul, often releasing multiple projects at once (in 2022) as free downloads. Their 2020 records, Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise), arrived during the summer of George Floyd’s murder and spoke to that moment. The anonymity lets the collective voice stay collective—no star to distract from the message, no personality to project onto the prayers.
Chapter 1 opens with a request to God and never stops asking. “The power that they call strengthens me/God protect me from my enemies,” Cleo’s voice pleads, then pleads again, then keeps pleading until the words blur into a kind of pulse. This is SAULT’s method. Say something until it stops being a sentence and starts being a wall. They have spent years making music where collective voice and spiritual language do actual structural work. They’re building songs out of phrases you might tell yourself in the morning before a day you’re dreading.
The album runs thirty-six minutes and contains ten tracks, most of which could be described in a single sentence. “Don’t Worry About What You Can’t Control” repeats its title eight times. “Love Does Not Equal Pain” cycles through its title maybe fifteen times. This could be insufferable on the surface. Mostly it isn’t, because SAULT understands that the power of repetition is in the delivery, and in what sneaks in between the well-executed compositions. Cleo Sol, as always, is the star of the album with her delicate vocals, and, aside from Inflo producing the entire record, he also invites the icons Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis to provide additional production details.
Take the title song, the album’s sharpest track. “You’re just a loser, and hate that I’m a winner” sounds like playground trash talk, the kind of thing you’d hear from a kid who just learned the word “loser.” Cleo Sol isn’t trying to hurt anyone. She’s just tired of explaining. “Living in your head ‘cause the rent is cheap” is a good line—it takes the cliché about living rent-free and twists the knife toward the hater’s poverty of imagination. And then: “Wake up every morning, thoughts are on repeat/Saying, ‘Why’s everybody so obsessed with me?’” The Mariah Carey echo is probably intentional, but it captures something real about the exhaustion of being watched by people who resent you.
“Puppet” goes harder and longer. With main vocals by Melissa Young, the track opens with “I’m not a puppet, I’m not a puppet/I like to do it how I like it, like it,” stacking internal rhymes until the words start to feel like armor. Then comes the accusation: “Set the prize, and now you’re bleeding me, you’re bleeding.” Someone got used. The song knows exactly how. What saves “Puppet” from grievance-rap territory is the pivot into accomplishment: “Changed my life, I really done it, done it Paid my way, I really done it, done it/Got a ring, PhD, I’m ‘bout to get it, ‘bout to get it.” It’s proof of survival. And then, quietly, a spoken line: “You were special before you could talk.” The shift from defiance to tenderness happens without warning, and the song earns it because the anger came first.
“Love Does Not Equal Pain” works a stranger vein. The title cycles through the entire track, but the lines between the cycles keep shifting: “They hate what’s in your brain” trades places with “They’re jealous of what’s in your brain.” Hate and jealousy blur together. The chant section gets grammatically weird—“You! They hate to love, you/They hate to love, you”—in a way that makes the words harder to process and harder to dismiss. At the moment of the track, it asks, “Do you see? Do you love?” The questions feel genuinely disorienting, like the song has talked itself into a corner and is asking us to help it out.
The spiritual tracks are less surprising but still sturdy. “God, Protect Me from My Enemies” opens the album by cycling through its title phrase until the words lose their pleading quality and start sounding like fact. “The power that they call strengthens me” announces protection as already present, not requested. “Protector” pushes further, as Cleo sings, “You are my protector, and I’m your survivor” becomes a call-and-response, and the line “we’re dancing together, and there’s a war that God is fighting” turns faith into tactical confidence. “Lord Have Mercy,” the album’s briefest track, exhales where the others push forward—“You’re free, free forever” lands as a rest stop between declarations.
The uplift tracks take up more space and land with less force. “Fulfil Your Spirit,” “Good Things Will Come After the Pressure,” “Create Your Prophecy,” and “Don’t Worry About What You Can’t Control” all build confidence through repetition. The technique works best when the writing stays specific. “Good Things Will Come After the Pressure” earns its patience because it pairs waiting with refusal: “I refuse to fight with fire/This is my warning.” The song doesn’t promise that waiting will be easy. It promises that fighting wrong won’t help. “Create Your Prophecy” includes a spoken affirmation—“I love myself and I accept my love for myself”—that briefly turns the song into a guided meditation, and the transition feels natural.
The music in the album is very similar to that which you might hear during a church service. Each element is simplistic and steady. The arrangement is very focused on support rather than complicating. In “Puppet,” the lyrics build expectation through their use of rhyme, but the instrumentals remain static. “Protector” allows an “ooh, ooh, ooh” pause to rest before returning to its refrain. All of these songs are almost certainly not meant for radio, but for private use, that is likely driving, walking, lying in bed before a difficult day, and all. The singing is meant to be prominent, not to signal individual testimony, but to be a voice for the whole; Cleo still holds it down.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Good Things Will Come After the Pressure,” “Love Does Not Equal Pain,” “Puppet”
Just finished listening to the album and this just sumps up all I was thinking about it. 36 minutes of what feels like a personal sermon.