Album: Labrinth – Ends & Begins
I got hit by a truck, I got hit by a truck and it drove off and left me here for dead,” Labrinth sings plainly in the opening seconds of Ends & Begins, the savant artist-producer’s third studio album. When we last heard from Labrinth—on 2019’s Imagination & the Misfit Kid, a concept record that told the story of a young artist who trades his creativity to a businessman in exchange for success—he was excavating himself from underneath the pressure that had piled on him since signing to Simon Cowell’s now defunct record label Syco. Ends & Begins is a tight 10-track record that consolidates his experimentation years into a sound that feels wholly original, yet familiar. It draws an immediate line under those difficult times, picking up directly where Imagination & the Misfit Kid left off, and explores what happened next.