{"id":238055,"date":"2025-10-24T23:59:12","date_gmt":"2025-10-24T23:59:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/238055\/"},"modified":"2025-10-24T23:59:12","modified_gmt":"2025-10-24T23:59:12","slug":"dave-the-boy-who-played-the-harp-review-its-clearer-than-ever-what-a-stunningly-skilled-rapper-he-is-dave","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/238055\/","title":{"rendered":"Dave: The Boy Who Played the Harp review \u2013 \u200bit\u2019s clearer than ever what a stunningly skilled rapper he is | Dave"},"content":{"rendered":"

As Dave<\/a> notes, a few minutes into his third album, he\u2019s been conspicuous by his absence for \u201ca couple summers\u201d. Four years separate The Boy Who Played the Harp from his last solo album, the platinum-selling We\u2019re All Alone in This Together. Perhaps more strikingly, it\u2019s been two years since he released Split Decision, the collaborative EP with Central Cee that spawned Sprinter: not just the longest-running UK rap No 1 in history, but the track that finally did the thing that it seemed increasingly unlikely a UK rap track would ever do and became a hit in the US, selling a million copies and even winding up on Barack Obama\u2019s annual playlist. But rather than attempt to capitalise on its US success, as Central Cee did \u2013 jumping on tracks by big names ranging from J Cole to Ice Spice to Jung Kook from BTS; releasing a debut album that was announced on a live NFL broadcast, featured a plethora of American guest stars and ultimately wound up in the US Top 10 \u2013 Dave essentially withdrew from music.<\/p>\n

It was, by any metric, a counterintuitive move, and anyone wondering why, or what he\u2019s been doing, will find some answers in The Boy Who Played the Harp. It opens with portentous-sounding organ and a couple of verses that do exactly what you might expect an artist in his position to do: reassert his vast success and wealth \u2013 he\u2019s \u201calready a legend\u201d, his home apparently comes with a \u201cgarden the size of Adam and Eve\u2019s\u201d and \u201ca forest\u201d \u2013 but that turns out to be a feint, both musically and lyrically.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

The Boy Who Played the Harp is a very muted-sounding album indeed, big on sparse arrangements, gentle piano figures and subtle pleasures: the unsettled, skittering beats and helium vocal samples that open 175 Months, the quietly eerie harmony vocals that appear midway through My 27th Birthday. Several of its tracks run over the six minute mark, while even its poppiest moments \u2013 No Weapons, which reunites him with Sprinter producer Jim Legxacy, and Raindance, a collaboration with Nigerian singer Tems \u2013 feel understated. And once the opening verses of History are out of the way, it\u2019s an album noticeably light on self-aggrandising swagger: to judge by the rest of the lyrics, Dave has spent a significant proportion of the last couple of years consumed by a series of existential crises. \u201cWhy don\u2019t you post pictures, or why don\u2019t you drop music?\u201d he admonishes himself at one point. \u201cOr why not do something but sitting and stressing yourself?\u201d<\/p>\n

Dave: The Boy Who Played the Harp album artwork.<\/p>\n

Some of his issues are universal, the kind of thoughts that tend to plague people in their late 20s, that weird period in life where you realise that you\u2019re incontrovertibly an adult, whether you feel like one or not. He spends a lot of The Boy Who Played the Harp thrashing over the pros and cons of settling down, unable to work out whether it\u2019s something he is emotionally capable of or not: \u201cYou should have had kids \u2026 don\u2019t you feel like you\u2019re behind?\u201d he frets on the crestfallen Selfish. The brilliant Chapter 16 is styled as a lengthy dialogue between Dave and Kano, the latter now a patriarchal figure in UK rap, whose career began when Dave was at primary school. It shifts suddenly from discussing the music industry and the impact of sudden fame on your friends to Dave petitioning Kano, a contented family man, for relationship advice: the latter hymns the pleasure of swapping \u201ca silver Porsche\u201d for \u201cleather Max-Cosi baby seats in the SUV\u201d.<\/p>\n

Dave, centre, flanked by his collaborators on The Boy With the Harp, from left: Kano, Jim Legxacy, Tems and James Blake. Photograph: Gabriel Moses<\/p>\n

But he also seems conflicted about his career, worrying aloud about whether his lyrics are sufficiently socially aware, and whether they have any impact even if they are, working himself up into such a state on My 27th Birthday that he ends up questioning whether the world actually needs to hear anyone rapping at all: \u201cWe don\u2019t need no commentators, we can leave that to the sports \/ Just listen to the music, why\u2019d you need somebody\u2019s thoughts?\u201d<\/p>\n

The irony is that he has already answered that question. An album full of self-examination by a rich and successful pop star might seem like a schlep on paper, but Dave is a fantastically smart, sharp lyricist, more than capable of making it work \u2013 The Boy With the Harp feels fascinating, rather than self-indulgent \u2013 just as he\u2019s technically skilled enough to make the album\u2019s muted sound a bonus: it focuses attention on his voice and exemplary flow.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a point underlined when he finally shifts his gaze outwards on Marvellous and Fairchild, two tracks that emphasise his brilliance as a storyteller: the former tracks a 17-year-old\u2019s progress from drugs to violence to jail, while the latter slowly details a sexual assault, shifting from Dave\u2019s voice to that of female rapper Nicole Blakk, before exploding into a burst of rage that variously takes in \u201cincels\u201d, the murder of Sarah Everard, and hip-hop\u2019s objectification of women: \u201cI\u2019m complicit, no better than you\u201d. It\u2019s harrowing, gripping and powerful: all the evidence you need that Dave\u2019s doubts about himself are unfounded.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"As Dave notes, a few minutes into his third album, he\u2019s been conspicuous by his absence for \u201ca…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":238056,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[49,48,75,341],"class_list":{"0":"post-238055","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-music"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238055","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=238055"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/238055\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/238056"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=238055"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=238055"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=238055"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}