Little Simz walks through the valley of the shadow and emerges not with platitudes but with commandments.
“Flood,” the second track and lead single from her sixth studio album Lotus, arrives as something closer to ancient testimony than contemporary rap.
Obongjayar and Moonchild Sanelly join her for what feels less like collaboration and more like congregation, voices raised against forces seen and unseen.
The Sound: Where Ritual Meets Rhythm
Forget your expectations of what a rap song should sound like. “Flood” moves with the pulse of something older, something that predates genre itself.
Producer Miles James constructs a sonic architecture built on militant percussion that thuds like ceremonial drums echoing across empty plains.
The tribal elements never feel borrowed or appropriated; they feel excavated, as though Simz and her collaborators unearthed something that was always waiting beneath the surface.
The post-punk bassline prowls through the track like a predator circling its territory. It’s the same energy that powered ESG’s NYC no-wave experiments decades ago, except now it’s carrying the weight of a woman who’s watched friendships curdle into betrayal.
Each drum hit lands with the finality of a gavel, each bassline descent pulls you deeper into Simz’s state of mind.
What separates this from typical experimental indie rap is the restraint. There are no unnecessary flourishes, no moments where production overwhelms the message. Everything serves the liturgy Simz is delivering.
The mix keeps her voice deliberately low in places, which initially frustrated some listeners expecting the clarity of Grey Area or the lush arrangements of Sometimes I Might Be Introvert. But that choice reads as intentional. You have to lean in. You have to work to receive the transmission.
The Lyrics: Commandments for Walking Through Hell
Simz opens with defiance that borders on accusation. “How dare you? / I was shutting down the world and it scared you.” Not a question. A statement of fact.
The whole first verse operates in this space of righteous fury, the kind that comes when someone you trusted proves themselves hollow.
She namedrops her own excellence with the casual confidence of someone who no longer needs external validation: “Can’t hold a girl down that is this bad / She ain’t nice, check my nails and my hairdo.”
But “Flood” shifts from personal grievance to universal wisdom in its structure. By the time the second verse arrives, Simz is teaching.
The song transforms into a survival guide, a set of rules for navigating a world that constantly tries to drown you. The imagery pulls from biblical language without becoming preachy. “Could’ve drowned but stayed with the mic” functions as both literal history and spiritual metaphor. The waters rise, the pressure builds, but she chose her weapon and held on.
The third verse delivers six numbered lessons that could be carved into stone tablets:
Number one: Play your position. Don’t trust every outstretched hand.
Number two: Snakes infest this place. Stay vigilant.
Number three: Protect yourself first. Heaven and hell are real, and people will drag you down.
Number four: Don’t engage with those who copy your energy.
Number five: Keep family business private; loyalty gets vicious.
Number six: Don’t quit. Keep building.
These aren’t cute maxims for Instagram captions. These are rules written in blood and experience, passed down like any oral tradition from elder to initiate.
Simz positions herself as the one who’s walked the path and returned to warn others. The spiritual dimension comes through not in explicitly religious language but in the weight of her authority, the sense that she’s speaking from a place beyond mere opinion.
The Spiritual Warfare: Obongjayar’s Light
Obongjayar’s contribution elevates “Flood” from personal grievance to cosmic battle. His refrain circles back throughout the track like a protection spell: “As I walk this wicked ground / Keep me away from the Devil’s palm / I am the light.”
That last line matters. “I am the light” isn’t aspirational. It’s declarative. It’s the same energy as “I am that I am,” the self-defining statement that requires no external permission.
Obongjayar doesn’t ask for the light or hope to become the light. He claims it as present-tense reality. In the context of spiritual warfare, this is how you survive. You don’t beg for protection. You become what cannot be extinguished.
Moonchild Sanelly’s presence adds another layer, her vocals woven through the outro in Xhosa, creating a linguistic barrier that paradoxically makes the message more universal.
You don’t need to translate every word to understand the energy she’s channeling. It’s the same energy that’s powered liberation songs and resistance anthems across continents and centuries. The specific cultural roots matter, but the frequency transcends them.
The Visual Testament: Matador Versus Machine
Director Salomon Ligthelm’s video reimagines the matador’s ritual dance as automotive warfare. Simz faces down a muscle car instead of a bull, transforming that ancient symbol of masculine domination into something far more contemporary and insidious.
The machine represents power, status, the material world’s empty promises. It’s everything the song warns against, made literal.
The comparison to Robert Eggers’ filmmaking style isn’t accidental. Both artists understand that horror and spirituality occupy the same territory, that the most effective way to depict the unseen is through meticulous attention to the seen.
Ligthelm fills the frame with dancers wearing ram’s heads, choreography that looks ritualistic because it is ritualistic. These aren’t music video aesthetics borrowed from occult imagery. This is ceremony caught on camera.
The video operates as visual doctrine for everything the song preaches. The car circles, threatens, lunges. Simz stands her ground, moves with intention, refuses to flinch.
Watch her body language throughout. She never performs fear. The matador archetype works because it’s always been about reading death’s approach and choosing grace over panic. The stakes are explicitly spiritual; the execution is viscerally physical.
The Context: Betrayal as Catalyst
Understanding “Flood” requires acknowledging what precipitated it. The lawsuit against former collaborator Inflo, the fractured working relationship that once defined much of Simz’s sound, casts a shadow that the song walks through deliberately. The betrayal isn’t subtext. It’s the text. “Told lies, but my silence is louder” references the choice not to air every grievance publicly, to let the work speak instead.
Listening to Lotus in full reveals how deeply betrayal, friendship, and familial bonds thread through every track like exposed nerve endings.
“Flood” functions as the album’s spiritual centre, its opening declaration of war and survival. Simz doesn’t just document her survival here; she claims the authority that comes from walking through fire and emerging with hard-won wisdom.
This registers as considerably darker and more urgent than “Point and Kill,” her previous collaboration with Obongjayar from Sometimes I Might Be Introvert. That track celebrated connection and creative kinship. “Flood” mourns the death of trust while refusing to let that loss become a grave.
Why It Works (And Why Some Resist It)
“Flood” demands something from its listeners that contemporary music rarely asks for: attention without immediate reward.
There’s no explosive hook designed to lodge in your brain after one play. The groove hypnotises through repetition rather than variation. For listeners accustomed to constant escalation, this can read as static. For those willing to enter its trance state, it reveals depth that flashier songs can’t access.
The spiritual vocabulary throughout might alienate the strictly secular, but Simz never proselytizes. She’s not trying to convert anyone to a specific doctrine.
The language of light versus darkness, devils versus guardians, operates as metaphor grounded in very material realities. The snakes are real people. The floods are actual obstacles. The commandments are practical survival strategies dressed in cosmic language because sometimes that’s the only vocabulary that fits the scale of what you’re trying to express.
The Verdict
“Flood” is not a typical rap song because Little Simz is not a typical rapper. She operates in that rare space where technical skill, spiritual hunger, and artistic vision align completely.
This is music made by someone who understands that survival sometimes requires ritual, that wisdom gets passed down through repetition, that the personal is always political and often divine.
For fans who want the intricate wordplay and lush production of Sometimes I Might Be Introvert, this will require adjustment.
For those who appreciated the raw edges of NO THANK YOU, “Flood” pushes that aesthetic even further into uncompromising territory.
This is Little Simz at her most confrontational, which paradoxically might also be her most vulnerable. She’s giving you the manual for how she survived. Whether you use it is your choice.
The tribal drums drive forward. The post-punk bass descends. Obongjayar declares his light. Moonchild Sanelly sings in tongues. And Little Simz walks through the flood that should have drowned her, emerges on the other side, and turns back to show others the way through.
That’s not just a good song. That’s scripture.
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