Kate Tempest

Kate Tempest description

Performance poet, rapper, actor, novelist and playwright Kate Tempest has reinvented the power of the spoken word.

They pour out of her in a blend of hip hop and poetry, rhymes intertwined with post-dubstep electronic beats, giving voice to the concerns of a generation – poverty, passion, alienation, gentrification, climate change, class, intolerance, acceptance, loss and love. With stripped back accompaniment, she encompasses tracks from 2016’s Let Them Eat Chaos through to her latest album The Book of Traps and Lessons, seamlessly and thrillingly moving from speech to song, sailing over grooves then suddenly locking in with them, switching from blistering attack to profound reflection, from utter desperation to surprising hope.

As the British press put it: this isn’t a gig, it’s a reckoning.

[She] absorbs all of the uncertainty and anger of our times, and pours it into ferocious, apocalyptic music that both wounds and heals… Tempest is an excruciatingly beautiful performer.

The Guardian, UK