On Kae Tempest’s third album, The Book of Traps and Lessons, the south London poet, rapper and novelist strips away the tense, blistering sounds of 2016’s Mercury-nominated Let Them Eat Chaos and zones in on a sparser, more intricate backdrop to their stunning spoken word. Big, booming bass is replaced—courtesy of Tempest’s longterm collaborator Dan Carey—with delicate piano melodies, soft electrobeats and strings. There’s silence on the powerful “All Humans Too Late”, on which Tempest eviscerates our obsession with social media and our dependence on pornography, while they desperately wonder when humanity might wake up to the impending crisis it faces. Elsewhere, the poet—who recorded The Book of Traps and Lessons with Carey in one, astonishing take—offers visceral assessments on their “country falling apart” post-Brexit, capitalism, city living and love (in all its pain and glory). But for all those words of warning, there’s optimism within these verses. “There is so much peace to be found in people’s faces,” Tempest says on the album’s final track. “I can, I can feel things changing.”