PLAYGROUND

Hove · b. 2004 · FARA Records

PLAYGROUND (Nia Farrow, b. 7 August 2004, Hove) grew up in a town joined to Brighton that insists it isn't. She was the eldest of four in a loud house and spent her childhood as a second adult in it — the one who did the school run, knew where everything was, and learned to talk to small people as though they were people. That isn't incidental: it's why she can deliver a spoken passage about children without a trace of sentimentality — she finds them exhausting, funny and completely serious, which is roughly how the record sounds. She found her way in through spoken word before singing — school poetry slams at fifteen, then open mics she was too young to be at, then a few years of features on other people's tracks where the brief was always “say something at the start.”

Close, dry and conversational. She works almost entirely below singing — spoken, half-whispered, occasionally landing on a pitch and leaving again — and her whole technique is refusing to perform the emotion in a line. Given a sentence about children she'll say it flatly, and it lands harder for it. She's also very precise rhythmically, which is why she can sit spoken text over a 174 break without either fighting it or riding it. Her influences run the spoken-word tradition in UK dance music, where a voice arrives, says one thing and leaves; the poetry-slam training that taught her timing; and MCs rather than singers, for the way they treat words as percussion.

The opposite of her collaborator: present, direct, entirely comfortable being looked at, and the one who'll actually do the interview. On stage she stands still and talks, which in a room expecting a drop is a genuinely bold thing to do and works every time. She did the school run from the age of twelve and maintains this is the only qualification required to talk about children without being sentimental about them. Her rule is to deliver the biggest line in a track completely flat — she's argued about it with three producers and won each time. Hove, not Brighton; she will correct you. Warm, blunt, capable.