13. Process / Sampha

Process was a deserving winner of 2017’s Mercury Prize, the highest musical honor from the United Kingdom and Ireland.  Having scored successful collaborations with Drake, Kanye, Solange, and Jessie Ware, among others, Sampha Sisay avoids an overly commercial route with his first full-length, instead charting an ambitious course through electronic R&B with sophisticated tempo changes, flourishes of piano and strings, and zeitgeisty beats and knob-twiddles.  The results are sometimes spine-chilling and always pristine, as he unspools vignettes of his life as a young black man and South Londoner.

Sampha’s futuristic soul can start sounding icy, but then his voice kicks in and pulls everything into a warm, cathartic core.  His spellbinding world is lit by the invitation of not only his voice, but his own searching humanity, reaching for healing and understanding in the wake of personal upheaval.  As an autobiographical record, Process plays out his coming of age with delicate focus, cataloging his longing and worry as the relationships around him are fissured by time or space.

Highlights include the soul-searing opener, the running desperation of "Blood on Me," the hurling self-realization of "Reverse Faults," and the heavenly prison of "Prayer for Timmy."  The nocturnal arrangements seep in at the edges of his aching voice as the light he seeks looks distant and elusive.  Sampha finally finds home, if only for a moment, in the touching solo "No One Knows Me (Like the Piano)," easily one of the year's most beautiful songs.