If you’ve been paying attention to UK hip-hop over the past few years, you will have encountered TrueMendous turning up on other people’s records and consistently delivering cameos that 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 and 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 is, at its heart, a tribute to family that’s intimate, warm and deeply personal, and that intimacy is precisely what stops the enormous subjects it tackles from ever feeling overblown. These are weighty and serious themes with real tragedy and sadness running through the album, but rather than feeling heavy handed it feels like being welcomed into her home.

The album opens with Please Don’t Idolise Me with no beat to speak of, all the rhythm coming from TrueMendous’ voice alone, comfortable enough in her own skin to begin her most ambitious work with almost nothing but herself. Been a Minute, Been a While follows earthy and groovy before Diapers & Cribs arrives as one of the album’s most stunning early moments. Built on a jazzy guitar lick it’s a song about longing to be five years old again with an extraordinary specificity to its references, describing the texture of childhood before responsibility and stress and placing you right back inside moments you haven’t thought about in years.

Rate My Look shifts to pretty and bouncy UK garage rooted deeply in the MJ Cole tradition, and a smorgasbord of sounds specific to the UK runs through the entire record. Bad for Real brings considerable weight and Stupid Af strips everything back again, 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. The production throughout is soulful, jazzy and brilliantly rich with collaborations that make the whole thing feel like a family gathering.

With Jamaican influences and classic hip-hop foundations, Break Offline is full of character and endlessly fun to listen to. TrueMendous’ talent is just as much about having a friendly and cheeky voice as it is about being technically quick with rhymes, with so many lines on this record that make you laugh or ache or both.

More concerned with honest and brutal expression than showing off, TrueMendous is an artist cutting deep with a knife and dealing in raw and uncomfortable truths, yet doing so with a warm personality and presence that’s lovely to spend time with.