The Mystery of SAULT
SAULT remains one of contemporary music’s most enigmatic collectives — and the anonymity is deliberate. No press photos, no interviews, no artist bios. The focus stays entirely on the music and its message. What is confirmed: the project is built around Inflo (Dean Josiah Cover), a British producer who has become one of the most significant behind-the-scenes figures in contemporary soul and R&B. Cleo Sol — vocalist and songwriter — is the other consistent core presence, her voice threading through the SAULT catalogue. Kid Sister (Melisa Young) rounds out what appears to be the inner circle.
The superband rumours have circulated persistently — Thom Yorke’s name has been floated — but nothing has been confirmed and there’s no real evidence. What is clear is that Inflo moves in significant circles. He produced Michael Kiwanuka’s Mercury Prize-winning album KIWANUKA, worked closely with Little Simz, and has collaborated with Adele and Beyoncé. SAULT’s December 2023 live debut at Drumsheds in London — their first ever public performance — revealed the wider collaborator network in person: Little Simz, Kiwanuka, Chronixx, Ganavya. Not anonymous at all, it turns out. Just very patient about when to show themselves.
Released on Juneteenth, Three Weeks After George Floyd
The album dropped on 19 June 2020 — Juneteenth — three weeks after George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. That timing was not accidental. Untitled (Black Is) functions as both a musical statement and a political document, but the politics never feel like a press release. They emerge from the sound itself — from the weight of the drums, the rawness of the vocals, the way Afrobeat rhythms and gospel and 1970s soul are woven together into something that feels urgent without being reactive.
Tone and Texture — What Surprises
What surprises most about the album is the tonal range it holds across its runtime. It doesn’t settle into a single register. There are moments of real menace — production that feels physically heavy, rhythms that push rather than invite — and then without warning the album opens into something almost devotional, voices layered into something closer to gospel than to anything contemporary. Then something stripped and percussive. Then something slow and barely there.
The textures shift constantly: dense poly-rhythmic arrangements giving way to almost empty spaces, a single voice over minimal instrumentation, before the collective roar returns. It rewards sustained listening precisely because it keeps moving. Each session with the album finds a different surface — which is part of why it works so well as work music. It creates atmosphere without demanding attention, and then pulls you back in when you’ve forgotten it was there.
If you want to hear how different this album can be within a single 20-track, 56m36s record, just listen to four tracks in sequence: Hard Life (#3), Bow (#9), Black (#12), Monsters (#16). Four very different emotional worlds, four different sonic registers — and yet they belong unambiguously to the same album. That coherence across such range is the achievement.
Wildfires — The Track That Cuts Through
“Wildfires” is the album’s gravitational centre — the track that critics cited most, that got the widest press attention, that NPR included in their We Insist protest music timeline. It’s hypnotic in a way that most protest music isn’t: a groove that repeats and deepens rather than escalating, vocals that state rather than declaim. The police brutality subject is addressed directly but without theatrics. The restraint is what makes it devastating.
It is the closest thing the album has to a single, and also the track that most clearly locates SAULT in a specific lineage — the political soul of Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On (1971), Gil Scott-Heron’s spoken-word fury, the groove-as-resistance of the Afrobeat tradition.
Bow — Michael Kiwanuka, and the Afrobeat Connection
“Bow” is where the African lineage becomes most explicit. Kiwanuka — whose Ugandan heritage inflects his own work — shouts out African nations over Inflo’s spiralling Afrobeat-rooted percussion. It’s celebratory where much of the album is sombre, a release of a different kind. The track makes clear that the album’s politics aren’t only about grief and resistance — they’re also about pride, roots, and presence.
The Kiwanuka collaboration is also a reminder that SAULT, whatever their mystique, are not operating in isolation. They are embedded in a specific community of British artists — Kiwanuka, Little Simz, Cleo Sol — who are in conversation with each other and with a much longer history of Black British music.
Influences — What You’re Hearing
The sonic reference points are layered but audible:
- Marvin Gaye / What’s Going On — the integration of political content into soul without sacrificing the music’s beauty or groove
- Fela Kuti / Afrobeat — the poly-rhythmic percussion, the collective energy, the idea of music as communal political act
- Gil Scott-Heron — spoken word, the voice as documentary instrument, the refusal to separate art from civic life
- James Brown / funk — the rhythmic architecture, the physicality of the beats, the way groove becomes urgency
- UK underground soul and grime — Inflo’s production carries traces of British bass culture, the south London underground, the texture of contemporary UK soul
- Gospel — the layered vocal arrangements, the devotional quality that surfaces in the quieter passages, the sense of collective address
The result is music that sounds specific to 2020 and simultaneously rooted in fifty years of Black musical history. That’s the Inflo signature: impeccable taste in how traditions are brought into contact.
Politics Done Right
No preaching. No heavy-handedness. Tracks like “Don’t Shoot Guns Down” deliver their message with the precise balance of urgency and artistry — the politics emerge from the music, not the other way around. This is what separates political music that endures from political music that dates.
Standout Tracks:
- Wildfires (the one that cuts deepest — the de facto single)
- Bow (feat. Michael Kiwanuka — Afrobeat, African nations, celebration)
- Don’t Shoot Guns Down (direct, controlled, devastating)
Notes: Released 19 June 2020 (Juneteenth), three weeks after the murder of George Floyd. Later included in the five-album offering released simultaneously in November 2022 via WeTransfer — free download for five days, “as an offering to God.”