The primary message of Tell Dem It’s Sunny – the second studio album from south-east London’s Greentea Peng – might come penultimate track, I Am (Reborn). , what could have been cliched sentiment becomes reasonable truth. A riff-heavy swagger of a song that repeats its central mantra, “I am not who I was yesterday”, with increasing force, it’s the culmination of a record that consistently gives credence to this argument. Though the cosmic vibrations and reggae-influenced neo-soul of Aria Wells’s previous material – most recently 2022 mixtape Greenzone 108 – are still on display, Tell Dem It’s Sunny sends her musical palette into new realms while streamlining her lyrics into direct and self-examining terrain.
My Neck enlists genre-bending artist Wu-Lu, finding a pleasingly ominous middle ground between his lo-fi hip-hop and Wells’s fluidity, before segueing via 90s scratching and grizzled guitars into highlight Create or Destroy 432. Lead single Tardis (Hardest), with its mentions of Babylon, still finds space in the seam of healing and spirituality. But in stripping much of this away, such as on the Morcheeba-esque One Foot, with its plaintive questioning (“Is it too late for me?”), Greentea Peng finds even more richness in reality.
