Solomon

Harlem, New York · b. 2003 · FARA Records

Solomon (Solomon Grant, b. 10 April 2003) grew up in Harlem — the specific one: brownstones and bodegas, the A/C/B/D trains, church bells over the projects, the weight of the neighbourhood's history sitting right on top of the daily arithmetic of rent, bills and night shifts. He was raised hard, in a household under real economic pressure, with a mother who asks “you good?” and gets “yeah, I'm fine.” Church and gospel ran underneath everything. A watchful, sensitive kid who felt too much and learned to smile with his jaw locked tight, he found that music — soul, gospel, boom-bap — was the one room where the truth was allowed out.

Warm soul samples, Rhodes and dusty boom-bap drums — the honest lineage of conscious New York rap — became the place he could say the things men are taught to swallow. He wrote the truths he couldn't say out loud first; the page, then the booth, became the “open vein.” Not pain for applause — truth with discipline. His influences run the conscious, soulful East Coast lineage: the truth-telling of Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole, the soul-sample warmth of early Kanye, the jazz-rap and boom-bap tradition of Nas and A Tribe Called Quest, the humane introspection of Little Simz — with gospel and soul in the bones and Harlem's own rap and Renaissance history behind it.

There's no stage persona — that's the point. Grounded, calm and believable, he doesn't perform pain for applause; he tells the truth with discipline and restraint. Quietly magnetic, warm, humane and unshowy — the one who says the thing everyone else is swallowing. “Solomon” for the wisdom, and “Sol” for the sun: one small dawn in the teeth of the night. Honest, watchful, disciplined.