Sampha is the youngest of five brothers by over a decade. His older siblings — Junior, John, Sanie, and Ernest — spent their formative years in his parents’ hometown of Kenema, Sierra Leone. But in 1982, his dad, a diamond evaluator named Joe, got a new job and moved the family to London, where Sampha was born a few years later. They settled in a semi-detached house in Morden on the edge of the countryside. The move was a chance to provide more opportunities for his sons, and to escape the corruption in the diamond trade that was wreaking havoc in his home country. A few years later, a decade-long civil war would break out in Sierra Leone, killing over 50,000 people and turning hundreds of thousands into refugees.

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Sampha was 9 years old when his father died. “I wonder what kind of things I get from him,” he tells me in a gentle tone. “I always find it weird that you have [inherited] things about you that are not just physical: the things you think, the things you feel — the epigenetics or whatever.”

His mother and older brothers did their best to shelter Sampha from the trauma of his dad’s death, but nevertheless it left a void. In the years that followed, Sampha’s emotional world became entwined with music. His dad had bought a piano from their elderly neighbor when Sampha was 3. It was supposed to provide a “productive alternative to watching TV,” his brother Sanie tells me later, over the phone. And it worked; Sampha was always playing it. Later, he discovered music production as a young teen, after Sanie, who’s 16 years older, built himself a makeshift home studio in his house around the corner. But his real introduction to the music industry came second-hand via a London producer named Kwes, who he’d met on Myspace in 2007.

Back then, Sampha jokes, he thought “people in the music industry could far enough be aliens with huge blue hair and red eyes.” Kwes helped put things in perspective, though, and went on to introduce Sampha to Young Turks, which, at the time, was an offshoot of XL Recordings. But it was Kwes’s actual music — scratchy, bubbly tunes that defied conventional structure — that Sampha says changed his life. “It made me feel more okay with the songs I was writing,” he says. Through Kwes, Sampha met a community of like-minded artists, including Ghostpoet, DELS, and Micachu, whose music strived to make new, irregular shapes at a time when seamless, glossy pop like Girls Aloud and Sam Sparro was dominating the U.K. charts. Sampha would upload tracks to Myspace, and he says the response he got from his peers was liberating. He felt understood.

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That moment of understanding — of pure sonic communication — became something he actively sought out; it eventually resulted in Sundanza, his debut EP of intricate instrumentals released on CD-R by Young Turks in 2009. It was an exciting time at the label: The xx was enjoying debut album success, and expectations for Sampha were high.

He tells me about the “very unspoken connection” he had with SBTRKT while working on the London producer’s 2011 debut, for which Sampha wrote, produced, and sang. Later, when Drake received a .zip file of Sampha’s music from Young Turks in 2012, the first thing he showed interest in was a mid-tempo beat. Drake didn’t end up using it, but the choice was still mind-blowing for Sampha: one of the world’s biggest rappers recognized his skills as a producer. Rick Rubin also spotted something in Sampha’s music, and invited him out to L.A. to work with Kanye. The place where they met looked like a bungalow in the side of a hill, Sampha tells me, but opened into an underground mansion. He got nervous when Kanye was “really responsive” to the embryonic album tracks he played. “I listened to College Dropout religiously,” he says, still in awe even now.