How Sampha Made Process One of the Best Debut Albums Ever

When Sampha Sisay released Process in 2017, he had already been one of music's best-kept secrets for years. His voice had appeared on albums by Drake, Kanye West, Solange, and Frank Ocean, always the most emotionally resonant element on the track. Process finally let him step out of the feature role and into the spotlight, and the result was devastating.

The route in matters. Most people first heard that voice without knowing whose it was, on SBTRKT's 2011 debut, singing Hold On and Wildfire, and he had already put out two EPs on Young Turks, Sundanza in 2010 and Dual in 2013, before anyone asked him for an album. Process was his first record at 28. The unhurriedness is audible. Nothing on it sounds like a debut rushed out to cash in on the features.

The album was built around the death of his mother from cancer. Rather than making grief abstract, Sampha made it specific and physical. (No One Knows Me) Like the Piano was written about the upright piano in his family home, the instrument his mother taught him to play on. The song strips everything back to just voice and piano, and it is one of the most emotionally naked songs released this century.

Musically, Process blended electronic production with organic instrumentation in ways that felt entirely new. Plastic 100C opened with skittering drum programming that dissolved into warm keys and strings. Blood on Me paired paranoid lyrics with a beat that sounded like a heartbeat accelerating. Every production choice served the emotional narrative rather than showing off technique.

Rodaidh McDonald co-produced it, which explains the space in the mixes. He had worked on records by The xx and King Krule, records as concerned with the silence between sounds as with the sounds. Listen to how little is happening underneath the vocal on Timmy's Prayer. There is a habit in electronic soul of filling every bar with something. Process does the opposite, and that is largely why it still sounds current.

The album won the Mercury Prize in 2017, beating out records by Ed Sheeran, Stormzy, and The xx. It was the right call. Process was not the most commercially successful album of that year, but it was unquestionably the most artistically complete. Every song belonged exactly where it was, and removing any track would have diminished the whole.

Sampha's follow-up, Lahai, arrived in 2023 and proved Process was no fluke. But the debut remains the touchstone, a record that showed how electronic music and deeply personal songwriting could merge without either element compromising the other. It is the kind of album that makes other artists rethink what is possible.

Watch the film with it. Kahlil Joseph, one of the directors on Beyonce's Lemonade, made a short film to accompany Process, and it does what the record does, handling grief as landscape and family rather than as a subject. Then go to Lahai, from 2023, named after his own middle name and his grandfather's. It is faster, jazzier, built on live drums, and it is the sound of a man who has stopped standing still.

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