Album Review: SOUTH LDN LOVER GIRL by Ms Banks
Ms Banks spent twelve years earning a debut, and filled it with every version of herself she’d been withholding. None of them blinked. Love songs, protest songs, and crime stories with equal nerve.
Twelve years is a long time to call yourself an emerging artist. A mixtape in 2014, an EP, two more tapes, a number-one slot on the UK Hip-Hop and R&B Charts, opening for Cardi B, a MAGA Minaj co-sign that started with an unprompted tweet and ended with a spot on the NickiWrldTour, a BRIT Awards performance filling in alongside Little Mix, a Queen’s Jubilee set with Duran Duran and Nile Rodgers, a Fire in the Booth on 1Xtra that still gets cited as one of the best the segment has aired. All of that, and no album. Ms Banks, born Thyra Oji, raised on Walworth Road in Elephant and Castle to a Nigerian father and Ugandan mother, took her time. SOUTH LDN LOVER GIRL carries the weight of a career’s worth of unspent material, and it sounds like someone who decided that if the debut was finally coming, nothing would stay buried.
The album’s first words are a woman staring in a mirror and seeing a Black woman staring back. “Second generation,” she raps, “but first place for the cream.” Her nan came over and paved the way, and if the line don’t work, the trap won’t work, the lights won’t work. She doesn’t want a blue-collar shirt. The streets turned her into a thug, but all she wanted was to love. Two songs later, “Catch You Lackin’” picks up the same geography and sharpens it into pure menace. She grew up in South and it made her a soldier, she rolls with the youngers and fucks with the olders. And then the title track shows you what those streets can actually cost. A girl named Rih holds a gun for her boyfriend while he dodges the feds. She takes a cab to the West End to meet a friend, leaves the bag with the strap in the backseat, and gets arrested before he even makes it home. A second story follows a man called Jack with untreated mental health issues and weed-induced psychosis. He kills his girlfriend Pam, her mum, her nan, and her dad. The song closes with a line about migrants not being wanted in the United Kingdom. Banks recounts both stories in full, without commentary, letting the facts carry the horror.
On “WHY?,” she points the question at the whole system. Why is she more at risk in labour due to race? Why is she told it’d be better if she was light-skinned, that she’d have more global appeal? Why was a woman found dead in her house while police stayed outside for twenty minutes after neighbors called? The track runs as a series of questions with no one to answer them, and the refrain boils it down to seven words: stressed out, worked up, diamond in the rough. “WORK HARDER” picks up the thread. Sampling Layyah on the hook, “It’s hard being a woman, let alone one that is Black,: and Banks turns the verse personal. What does she say to her little sister when the workplace isn’t fucking with her? She went to Spain and her only souvenir was watching her brother sell sunglasses at the seashore. Banks declares she loves her country but wonders what happens when it doesn’t love her back. The upbeat “4C” flips the same anger into something brasher. Hair 4C, no BBL, no filler, she wears her Afro like a crown and calls out the lip filler trend with the confidence of someone who has settled the argument for herself. “POV” unsettles that confidence by asking a partner whether he’d still love her in the morning with no makeup, if she stopped doing music, if the stories he heard about her turned out to be true. She wants to know if two things can be true at the same time.
Scattered across the LP in different moods, the love songs pull in several directions at once. “NO LOVE” is the coldest of them—she only wants sex if it comes with a Rolex or big checks, she watches men like movies but doesn’t entertain them, and the hook asks what type of villain breaks hearts in the streets, while interpolating Shyne’s “Bad Boyz.” “S.O.S” is almost the opposite. “He feels like home,” she writes, and if they mess up they can do it over. “THE ONE” admits she doesn’t want to be alone. Those two positions, charge it to the game and please don’t leave me, exist on the same record without anyone picking a winner, and that honesty is the point. “IDK” brings Zinoleesky for a lighter cut about physical attraction that might be something deeper, and “WAR OUTSIDE” with Strandz poses the simplest version of the question: would you ride for me? The range between these songs is wider than most UK rap debuts would attempt, moving from transactional sex talk to quiet need within a few tracks.
“ME & YOU (OUTRO)” is the song the rest of the project has been protecting. Banks addresses herself as Tyra, her real name, and walks through her childhood on Penborough Estate—doing crime, smoking blem at ten with her white friends Tommy, Danny, Chelsea, and Alex, shotting a little weed. She and a friend shared a birthday and butted heads because they were both Aries. Then the song arrives at the disclosure everything else was circling:
“There was a night that he touched you
That time in Dad’s house, mentally and physically, he fucked you.”
She instructs herself not to talk about the taint of being abused, to become a shadow of yourself with nothing to lose. She labels the men who do this sadistic and adds that they treat you like a statistic. And then the track turns. She speaks directly to herself—“Yeah, Thyra, all the things you used to dream about, you live it, Thyra—and closes: “You done it, Thyra. I’m proud of you.” The specificity of those names, those streets, that abuse, lodges the song somewhere you can’t shake it. It is the most unguarded moment on any UK rap debut in recent memory. SOUTH LDN LOVER GIRL is a strong debut from someone who could’ve made a passable one years ago. Banks spent a decade in the conversation as a rapper. This LP proves something bigger. She’s a writer with range, nerve, and the willingness to say her own name out loud when it counts.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “WHY?,” “SOUTH LDN LOVER GIRL,” “ME & YOU (OUTRO)”