In “Love is a Kingdom” Tems Finally Embraces Romance

A certain recalcitrance is what makes Tems especially compelling. In moments when she tackles fraught subjects, when she’s seemingly backed in a corner, whether by a tumultuous love situation or by the machinations of malevolent forces, we hear her voice take on an ecclesiastical tone. Swooping and swelling, her powerful voice subdues the production with the forcefulness of a tempest. The exact lyrics she deploys are less the focus, what really matters is that she telegraphs a kind of truth that transcends intellect, cutting through to the depths of your soul and leaving you with palpable pathos for her plight. 

In Free Mind, from her feted For Broken Ears EP, she starts out cooing a poignant melody. Listen to this overture enough and you’ll start to feel yourself fall under the spell of her voice. And indeed, what follows is simply magic. By way of deceptively simple lyrics, she paints a scene in which she wakes up early in the morning to a throbbing anxiety and prays for some kind of reprieve from her implacable angst. “The noise in my head wouldn’t leave me/ I try to get by but I’m burning.” By the time we get to the hook and Tems is belting “I really need, I really need time now/ I really need, I need a free mind yeah,” you’d be suffocating under the weight of her yearning for equanimity. 

Ice T, from the same project, feels like an attempt by Tems to flex her artistic prowess—an attempt to prove herself capable of stirring the most visceral of emotions with but a few ingredients. The lyrics are barely coherent, she rapidly flits through an array of abstract topics. The bridge sounds something like a nursery rhyme about fruits: “Raspberry, blueberry, with your lemons sing.” She repeats this, over and over, with little tweaks each time—a riff here, a quick run there. We can fixate on interrogating these lines. Perhaps lemons are a metaphor for the unsavory parts of life and raspberries and blueberries are a metaphor for some reprieve Tems provides her muse—after all, earlier in the song, she sings about turning lemons into iced tea. But that would be speculative and misses the point: what really matters is the yearning she conveys.

In her latest EP Love Is a Kingdom, released on Friday without forewarning, she spurns her usual predilection for untangling emotionally fraught subjects and beleaguered romance, instead opening her heart to the possibility of finding love. Her debut album, Born in the Wild, released last year, finds Tems playing around with a smorgasbord of sounds. Crucially, the album is more upbeat than its predecessors, leaning more towards Afrobeats. In Love Is a Kingdom she leans further into this trend. The result is a project sitting at the intersection of R&B and Afrobeats. And while the imperative on the project is clearly to foreground Tems’ new disposition towards romance, a cautious apprehension casts a shadow over her romantic overtures. 

In I’m Not Sure, a disarmingly vulnerable ballad where over a groovy beat she communicates her uncertainty to her lover and urges them to prove their love, she sings: “Need to speak my mind on something/ Let me tell you how I feel/ Love is something I’m not used to/ So I’m leaving this to you.” It’s remarkable how her voice mirrors the uncertainty she interrogates in the song. Here her voice shifts to an airy, fluttery register, working in tandem with the sparse production to simulate a kind of cautious vulnerability. Lagos Love drips with the intense desire of I’m Not Sure, but it trades caution for a ferocity bordering on desperation. “How many days in a month are you thinkin’ of me?/ By you, say it, baby, don’t be easy on me/ Baby, calm down, clear your mind, let me know you want me/ I need you to show me, show me how you love me,” she sings.

The project takes a somewhat whimsical turn in Big Daddy where with humorous pettiness she takes swipes at a lover who deserted her when the chips were down, only to circle back after things got better. “Unbeliever-iever-ayy-iever-ayy. Undertaker-aker-ayy-taker-ayy/ No ambition, he’s a loser, ayy/ No ambition/ But he loves it when I call him

“big daddy”/ Big daddy, what’s the deal, daddy?/ Big daddy, jump for me, daddy Drop something for me, daddy Big daddy” she sings. It’s a callback to Looku Looku, an early single where with comparable insouciance she disparages a lascivious love interest. 

For all the pleasure the project supplies, it is however undermined by what can only be described as lazy songwriting. Across the project she consistently trails off theme, leans a little too much into cliches, and deploys hackneyed flows. First, which opens the project, is especially troubling. Here, Murphy’s infamous law—“Anything that can go wrong will”—finds effect. She starts by undercutting the glistening production with a painfully lackluster verse. The juvenile flow here is further worsened by the vacuity of the lyrics and their repetitiveness. Even when she tries to affect the intransigence that makes many of her early works so compelling, it falls flat. “They know I’m different, different/ All because I’m moving different, different/ They can’t stop me now, I’m different, different I be movin’ anyway.” By the time she sings “Eternity is real, that’s the way I feel, I feel,” in the fourth verse, you’ll probably catch yourself rolling your eyes.  

Mine is similarly blighted by very lazy songwriting. Same problems: tired flows, lazy lyrics. But the hook which essentially finds her singing “Mine,” nearly thirty times is utterly disappointing. It’s telling that the best song on the project, What You Need, is also the best written of the lot. The writing here maintains the simplicity of her early work and luxuriates in an emotionally fraught atmosphere. “But I’m so confused/ To all the pain and suffering/ You still wanna stay with me/ I’m tired of this crisis.” Hearing her take apart the sinews of a fraught relationship, with unbelievable tenderness and a precision that borders on clinical, you once again feel the familiar warmth that runs through the best of her work. It’s Tems at the height of her powers and you can’t help but give in to the magic of her singular voice.