If you’ve been paying attention to UK hip-hop over the past few years, you will have encountered TrueMendous delivering cameos on other people’s records that consistently threaten to steal the whole show. She has a particular ability to speak about broken and fractured relationships with a devastating precision that very few rappers can match. Break Offline, Before I Have a Breakdown Online is the full realisation of that gift.

This is a record about love. Love for family, love lost, love remembered and love mourned, with references throughout to her grandparents and the depth of feeling she carries for them. This album is a warm and deeply personal tribute to family with an intimacy that stops the enormous subjects it tackles from ever feeling overblown. These are weighty, serious themes with real tragedy and sadness running through the album, but it feels like being welcomed into her home. Diapers & Cribs arrives as one of the album’s earliest and most stunning moments built on a jazzy guitar lick. It’s a song about longing to be five years old again before responsibility, stress and the weight of adult life. With a specificity to her references, TrueMendous places you right back into childhood with precision. Rate My Look is a UK garage tune, pretty and bouncy and a smorgasbord of sounds specific to the UK run through the entire record. Bad for Real brings considerable weight, and Stupid Af strips everything back, beatless and meditative. At just shy of an hour, Break Offline takes you across an enormous emotional map of regret, joy, heartache and anger, all of it handled with terrific character. TrueMendous is a joy to spend an hour with, and the production is brilliant with Jamaican influences, classic hip-hop foundations, and rich collaborations that make the whole album feel like a family gathering.