Were you to attempt to draw a portrait of the modern music industry, two events from the past year might guide your eye. In May, a flurry of well-established artists took to TikTok to express frustration at their record labels’ insistence that they must, well, post on TikTok. Short clips showed the tired faces of favourite popstars—like Ed Sheeran and FKA Twigs—bemoaning endless additions to schedules that increasingly seemed to be less about writing, recording and performing songs, and more about the tangential ephemera of promotional activity. “Everything is marketing,” posted the American singer Halsey. “And they are doing this to basically every artist these days. I just wanna release music, man.”
Then, in early November, a curveball: the musical collective Sault surprise-released five new albums simultaneously “as an offering to God”, making them all available as a free download for five days. Already, in the spring, they had released another album, Air, bringing a departure from supple R&B forms in favour of cinematic, choral-led compositions. It was made available via Bandcamp, where purchasers could name their own price. A few months later came an EP in the form of a 10-minute, reggae-infused track. There was no promotional rollout. No guest spots on chat shows nor festival headline slots. They have never played a live show. They do not do TikTok.
To give these events some context, the music industry is in its latest stage of disarray and reinvention. It is eager to make up for the lost touring dates of the pandemic age, and freshly in thrall to the video feeds of TikTok, now the dominant social media juggernaut. This is a gold rush era, with labels making fevered scrambles to sign burgeoning artists and throwing wild money after new talent, often based on a handful of fledgling songs.
This is not to portray TikTok as inherently slipshod—it can be a glorious, irreverent platform, and has unexpectedly rejuvenated the careers of many under-cherished artists, including Life Without Buildings and Black Box Recorder.
But what it has meant is that a lot of new music is shaped to suit a specific medium. Much as songs were once kept below the five-minute mark to fit on a 45rpm vinyl, lately the ideal has been short, catchy bursts to soundtrack video content.
It is a remarkable joy that, in the three brief years of their existence, Sault have refused to attend to any of these demands—yet have still reaped success and acclaim. To date remarkably little is known about the collective, besides the facts they are UK-based; that they pivot around the producer Inflo, famed for his work with Little Simz, Michael Kiwanuka and Adele; and draw from the deep well of black British musical history.
It was Sault’s two 2020 albums, Untitled (Black Is) and Untitled (Rise), that seemed to enforce their power. Released in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement, these albums offered not so much a soundtrack to shifting events, but a musical distillation of the beauty and fury and tension that bloomed during that time.
They featured guest collaborations; not just with established names such as Kiwanuka, but also in the form of a spoken-word performance by a north London charity worker. A later album, 2021’s Nine, would make space for a man recounting the experience of learning that his father had been murdered.
Releasing five new albums en masse, as Sault did in November, has proved a wonderfully confounding move in an age when songs are being encouraged to tout themselves in scrolled seconds. Not least because each stands as a distinct sonic offering.
If 11 feels like the most polished of the five, Untitled (God)’s 21 tracks are Sault at their most sprawling and evolving. The drummed-up punches of Today & Tomorrow are well met by the extraordinary, conjuring “The Lord’s With Me” and stand-out track “Stronger”. There is post-punk, there is rap, modern classical—a sinewy desire to defy classification, expectation, convention.
The music industry will never truly settle. It is a pitching sea, a restless sleeper. But in its current phase of turbulence, the artist has been set squarely against the mechanics of the industry. Sault’s wizardry is that they should create music so abundantly human without so much as showing their faces, never mind detailing the intricacies of their daily lives in video format across multiple social media platforms. In so doing, they offer a blueprint for their fellow artists—a way forward for those who just want to make music, man.
