Albums of the week: Dave, Cat Burns, The Charlatans and Makaya McCraven

The Boy Who Played the Harp

Dave

(Neighbourhood Recordings)

Part of the reason for the rapper Dave’s success is that he is such a nimble and convincing code-switcher. He has party raps about cars and girls – best exemplified by Sprinter, his 2023 collaboration with Central Cee that broke the record, which Dave himself previously held, for the longest-running UK rap No 1. But it is the 27-year-old’s existential battles – with success, survivor’s guilt and his wider purpose – that make his albums essential listening.

His third outing embarks on a series of reckonings with God, as well as maturity and the wider horrors of the world. The self-flagellation is intense. On Selfish, which suffers musically from a rote, mopey piano track courtesy of James Blake, Dave accuses himself: “What if I’m cancer?” he wonders. My 27th Birthday and the album’s title track are more self-lacerating.

Standouts here include the collaborations: with his terrific protege Jim Legxacy (No Weapons); with a mentor-figure Kano (the extraordinary Chapter 16); and rapper Nicole Blakk on Fairchild, an unflinching track about misogyny. A stronger dialogue between introspective themes and great beats – which Marvellous achieves – would have made this searing, important record even better. Kitty Empire

How to Be Human

Cat Burns

(RCA)

The south London singer-songwriter Cat Burns, who has found a wider audience thanks to her appearance on The Celebrity Traitors, has a knack for rich, candid storytelling. How to Be Human arrives just a year after her debut and, like its predecessor, it finds Burns offering solace to listeners while processing her own troubles. Grief seeps through, tender and raw, as she contemplates the loss of her grandfather: “The hospital ward was blocking the sky / When you were laying there with such love in your eyes,” she sings on Come Home, which imagines him receiving a call from God. There’s the miserable heartbreak of a relationship ending, and the ensuing guilt (and delight) of meeting someone new.

In spite of the weight of these themes, this is a polished, gleaming pop affair, the final third especially sugary and euphoric. There’s rippling guitar, twinkling piano, gliding strings, airy drums, as well as soft but powerful vocals complemented by choral harmonies. She might have heightened her subject matter by occasionally risking more distorted, disorienting soundscapes alongside her use of starkly intimate voice notes. Still, Burns has said her aim was to make a comfort album – and on that basis, she’s certainly succeeded. Tara Joshi

We Are Love

The Charlatans

(BMG)

Consistency should be applauded, even if it isn’t always rewarded. Northwich’s indie-rock troupers the Charlatans haven’t dropped an album in eight years, but We Are Love slips seamlessly into their back catalogue like a velvet bookmark. All the reasons they’re so enduring are here, as are the reasons they aren’t more popular. Their muscular musicianship is constantly impressive, but they still get weird on pocket epics such as Now Everything, with a magpie eye for psychedelia, soul and 60s pop that makes their albums unpredictable yet digestible.

Yet their ability to write compelling songs is diminishing. The softer, slinkier feel of previous gems such as So Oh or Hey Sunrise is set aside in place of a more familiar Charlatans sound, with several lyrical and musical nods to their 90s hits. Deeper and Deeper and Appetite offer nostalgic fun, as does the Smiths-ish title track, its ecstatic energy undercut by the hint of sadness running through it. Damien Morris

Off the Record

Makaya McCraven

(International Anthem)

Chicago’s Makaya McCraven is a jazz drumming powerhouse. Since the release of his 2012 debut album, Split Decision, he has formulated his own rhythmic language, sampling improvised live sessions that are spliced, edited and then pieced back together on his records. The result is unpredictable and energetic music that sits between hip-hop beat-making and spontaneous creation.

His latest project, Off the Record, is his most ambitious yet. A compilation of four EPs with four different bands – each recorded at live sessions dating from 2015 to 2025 – the result is a sprawling masterwork of interlacing grooves.

The mighty weight of Theon Cross’s tuba and the electronics of multi-instrumentalist Ben LaMar Gay punctuate the four thumping tracks on Techno Logic, while The People’s Mixtape plays through intricate polyrhythms courtesy of McCraven’s longtime bassist Junius Paul. Hidden Out! takes on a more meditative tone with guitarist Jeff Parker’s languorous melodic lines and PopUp Shop closes the compilation with five tracks of McCraven’s rooted groove. It’s a lively and impressively nuanced collection that shows off McCraven’s curatorial ear. Ammar Kalia

When the Chicago-born, New York-based artist KeiyaA released her debut album, Forever, Ya Girl, in 2020, she quietly shifted the landscape of underground R&B. Intimate, defiant and bursting with jazz-soaked emotion-filled songwriting, the record earned her critical acclaim, a global audience and a new sense of clarity after her turbulent early 20s.

Five years later, she returns with Hooke’s Law, which has already been hailed as one of the year’s most exciting releases. The project began as a stage play, Milk Thot, in which KeiyaA literally battled her shadow self, and has since evolved into a dense 19-track exploration of undoing and rebirth. “Hooke’s Law is about the journey of self-love from an angle that isn’t all affirmations and capitalistic self-care,” she said when announcing the album, emphasising its rejection of “traditional expectations of fat, Black, brown and dark-skinned women in our communities”.

Across the album, KeiyaA’s voice winds through layered arrangements of melancholic horns, jittery beats and soul-infused harmonies. But it’s in the moments when she allows herself to truly let go that the record is at its best: the jazz-electronic sprawl of Get Close 2 Me, the pixelated rage of I H8 U, the Auto-Tuned lust of Motions. Each track reveals an artist fearless in her self-expression; she is unbound by genre and unafraid of contradiction. Georgia Evans

Hooke’s Law is out now via XL Recordings. KeiyaA plays London’s Corsica Studios on 13 November

Photographs by Gabriel Moses/Sebastian Xavier/Shannon Marks/Cat Stevens/Jessica Foley