Of all the epic heroes to be namechecked in hip-hop lyrics, few are invoked more often than the shepherd David. The appeal of the Old Testament figure who conquered Jerusalem and felled Goliath could scarcely be more obvious: Rappers love warriors and kings, and he is both. He rose from the runt of the litter, faced long odds, silenced his haters and toppled a behemoth, literally becoming the stuff of legend. "If David could go against Goliath with a stone / I could go at Nas and Jigga both for the throne," 50 Cent once rapped. David is not just an underdog for the ages — perhaps the underdog — but a symbol of faith moving the immovable object out of one's path. And yet, there is much more to the Bethlemite's character than giant-killing.
The set-dressing around the big showdown in 1 Samuel is less fit for the rap theme of overcoming struggle to become a champion, but it is the primary fixation of the exceptional British rapper born David Orobosa Michael Omoregie. Dave, as he is known mononymously, is more concerned with what happened before David faced Goliath: As the story goes, the king Saul disobeyed God, and the prophet Samuel anointed David to rule in his stead. In the wake of his defiance, Saul was plagued by evil spirits, and a servant suggested he call David in to play the harp for him as a means of relief; David did so, and the spirits vanished. These are the Biblical verses that shape the rap verses on The Boy Who Played the Harp, Dave's third album, the first in four years — and his esteemed discography's crown jewel.
Since 2018, Dave has been the U.K.'s most decorated lyricist, scoring an Ivor Novello Award, a Mercury Prize and an album of the year win at the Brit Awards. But trophies pale in comparison to a higher calling, and on his latest work the rapper embraces not just his scriptural namesake but 1 Samuel's 16th chapter, in which David is anointed and plays his harp to pacify the phantoms. It could be said that London's top boy has spent the better part of an illustrious career soothing evil spirits, ancestral meditations girding his songs about being a traumatized Black yute in Streatham who grew into a generational voice. But the load of that responsibility is clearly weighing on him. He has ascended to a position of meaningful power; how best to use it?
Now 27, the rapper narrates the new album as though stricken by the contradictions of his chosen profession and sucked into the bog of its self-sustaining stress cycle: His artistic self-immolations have brought him popularity, which leads to class insulation, which in turn induces the shame and survivor's guilt that lead to further immolation. "How can I explain that I don't want to heal 'cause my identity is pain?" he pleads on "My 27th Birthday," before adding, "I wanna be a good man, but I wanna be myself too / And I don't think that I can do both." The personal reflections from inside his quarter-life crisis lead him not only to a philosophical breakthrough but to his sharpest music, expanding the theater of his solemn, elegant sound into a baroque cathedral. The Boy Who Played the Harp is as majestic as it is sturdily built. Across its 10 songs, Dave reevaluates what he owes his listeners, his forebears (in both rap and activism), his protégés (in the game and the streets), his community (at local, cultural and racial levels) and himself. "Ten years I been in the game and I won't lie, it's gettin' difficult," he raps. "This s*** used to be spiritual." The album is breathtaking in both its clarity of thought and purpose, as it walks all who bear witness through a career reckoning turned spirit awakening.
Dave is a quintessential album artist, who has dedicated his LPs to exploring the material conditions of the Black immigrants living in the U.K., though not without his share of status-seeking and flexing along the way. His 2019 debut, PSYCHODRAMA, was housed inside the diorama of a therapy session, as its subject lingered in the psychic toll inflicted by his tragic settler story — son of a deported Nigerian pastor, left homeless by the splitting of his family, who spent much of his teenage years on the streets while his two older brothers were locked up. On "Drama," that album's closer and an open letter to one of his jailed brothers, he set world domination in music as the goal. By the time he released We're All Alone in This Together in 2021, he was already standing atop the U.K. podium, and he settled into his success like a dignitary, taking three-car convoys through Sutton and flying to Santorini. But it wasn't all about his upward mobility: Dave used his newfound vantage point to critique British society, unpacking three generations of local immigration policy and its ramifications, and wrestling with his role in its systemic class struggle. On the closer, he lamented all those left behind in his ascent: "Survivor's guilt / I feel the worst at my happiest / 'Cause I miss all my n****s that couldn't be in this life I built."
Four years removed from back-to-back platinum albums in his country, adding a U.K. chart-topper ("Starlight") and a star-solidifying team-up with Central Cee ("Sprinter") in between, he now finds that his influence may be more symbolic than actionable. The Boy Who Played the Harp is constructed around his internal deliberations: the confession-booth disclosures of "175 Months," the solitary soul-searching of "Selfish," the #MeToo epiphanies of "Fairchild" and the eight-minute statement piece "My 27th Birthday," an immense, self-aware reappraisal of his complicity and inactivity. There is a sense across the album that it took four years to make because he was puzzling out the answers to questions posed in this song: Am I self-destructive? Am I doing the best for myself? Is my music just becoming a depiction of my wealth?
"My 27th Birthday" is stained with Drake's champagne-soaked influence, heard in its celebratory yet funereal tone and tumbling, scheming flows, but Dave has expanded beyond the solipsism of his predecessor's little time-stamped vanity projects. His closed-door investigations of self focus on where he is falling short, as a man and artist. One thing is clear: Those shortcomings do not extend to his writing, some of the most leveled and discerning in the game, balancing gravitas and bravado, poise and wit, concision and force. The rapping is delivered in massive chunks, yet can conjure walloping one-liners, dizzying vignettes and doctrinal passages that feel like personal scripture, pulling together a complex running monologue. Hookless, clear-eyed observation has been his modus operandi for years now, but these songs elevate the format from chaise-longue reflection and breathless fits of terror to ornate monodrama.
Never has this knack been put to greater use than on "Fairchild," a gripping six-minute opus that details the sexual assault of a fictional 24-year-old woman named Tamah. Men in hip-hop have yet to meaningfully engage with rape culture, or acknowledge the ways rap culture has fed it, but Dave (who has never shied aways from stories of abuse) takes this moment of messy self-examination to consider his involvement — as party thrower and bystander — and to amplify the accounts of survivors. As he raps, he shifts in and out of phase with the artist Nicole Blakk, warping the perspectives of narrator and listener. Their voices echo out over each other until he finally slingshots into the foreground with a call to action, a muffled synth blaring like a siren in the distance. It is a powerful, determined bit of portraiture that reveals just how elaborate his orchestration has become.
Ten years in, Dave knows exactly what he wants his songs to do and how to furnish them. His is a music of order, stateliness and prestige, usually implemented with somber piano and acoustic guitar or sweeping strings and far-off, hollowed drums, while also referencing the pop music of his parents' motherland. The Boy Who Played the Harp, co-produced primarily with James Blake, Jo Caleb and longtime partners Kyle Evans and Fraser T. Smith, offers an incredible continuity of sound, while also submitting Dave's music to some fine tuning. The maximalist, chest-beating opener, "History," is marked by towering pipe organ. "No Weapons" and "Raindance" ably blend his two sonic modes. Several songs swing open to reveal a posh second act. If "My 27th Birthday" is archetypal Dave, it's fitting that its singsong follow-up, "Marvellous" — written by request of Tamah's brother Josiah, a young footballer turned incarcerated stick-up kid — is a curdled, menacing play on U.K. drill, as if to deliberately step outside himself and his POV for a second. And in an effortless shift from mentor to mentee, he follows "No Weapons," the latest rendezvous with his heir apparent, rapper-producer Jim Legxacy, with "Chapter 16," which recreates a sit-down dinner with one of his progenitors, the grime legend Kano.
Dave notes on "My 27th Birthday" that he goes back and forth between his other guests — Blake, Legxacy and Tems — when deciding who might be the best artist in the world at the moment, but it's the 40-year-old who puts on the most impressive show here, and is most instructive to Dave's process. Now primarily an actor, Kano has set the rap game aside, and Dave needs to know why. Their exchange, which begins as a kind of winding celebrity icebreaker, evolves into a volley of cross-cultural, intergenerational banter, each rapper making a case for their individual greatness and also their interdependence: Kano inspired Dave to take the plunge into hip-hop, and Dave is the critically acclaimed fruit of all of Kano's hard labor. As a grand, crystalline piano riff ripples beneath them, they trade proverbs, the OG matching his scion stride for stride, and it's through Kano's probing questions about navigating fame, fortune and industry politics that Dave really begins to question his position: "And they short-change us / Paper chasin' all good till it's divorce papers / Newspapers, court papers, they all write my wills / They gon' talk about your won'ts, then they divide your wills."
"Chapter 16" seems to spur the many self-reflections that follow, and Dave's considerations of rap egocentricity and hypocrisy, its pitfalls and what he owes to those around him, all build toward the monumental closing title track. He steps outside of time to wonder what he would do at various moments in history — World War II, the civil rights movement, the sinking of the Titanic, the Battle of Karbala — before looking to the future. At first, he's unsteady, his resolve shaken. He isn't doing enough and the battle feels hopeless; retweets won't bring Chris Kaba back to life. "I talk 'bout all the money in my accounts so why don't I speak on the West Bank?" he asks himself. But suddenly, he is visited by nameless freedom fighters from the past, who suggest that action is progress, and only passivity is failure. Emboldened by the message, his remaining verse is triumphant, so resounding it feels like a declaration of war. Dave comes to accept the sacred covenant of his name and the mission bestowed upon him by his predecessors. He was tried in fire by Ghetts, received the torch from Kano and learned straight from his ancestors that his "life is prophecy." "There ain't a greater task," he recognizes, his head clear. In that moment, it is as if he rewrites the myth: David is the king haunted by spirits, and it is through the playing of his own music that he is able to tame them and become anointed.
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