The Limitless Little Simz

Little Simz, like any self-respecting, ambitious artist, feels like she’s “still scraping the surface” of what she can achieve. But don’t expect her to tell you where she wants to go next.

When I ask the 32-year-old about her goals, she simply looks at me and smiles — the kind of tight, closed-mouth smile of someone keeping their cards close to their chest. “I have loads of goals,” she says slowly, before another smile, another pause. “I’m very private about them. Yeah.”

That self-protective streak has worked so far for Simz, the rapper born Simbiatu Ajikawo, who, in 2025, posted her strongest year yet. Her sixth studio album, Lotus, which outfitted her scorched-earth lyrics in rock and post-punk influences, peaked at No. 3 on the U.K. charts — a career best. She then backed it up with shows at Manchester’s Co-op Live and London’s O2 Arena, which seat around 20,000 people each and marked her largest shows to date. Playing the O2 — one of the most iconic venues in London — is a career milestone for anyone; Simz, who will play Coachella and other festivals before opening for Gorillaz in North America this fall, is willing to admit that it was once one of those goals she keeps so closely guarded.

“I always thought, ‘I’mma play this venue one day, and I’mma headline it, and when I do, it’s gonna be up,’” she recalls. Simz, sitting across from me in the corner of a noisy photo studio in a navy hoodie and navy anorak, still made up luminously from her NYLON shoot, grins as she talks about the experience. “It’s everything you think, really. It’s nuts: You go in, very big room, and at soundcheck you think… Sh*t. This whole floor is gonna be filled. As much as it’s mad, whether it’s 100 people or 20,000 people, I’m still so particular about my show.”

Simz and I are meeting in early March, a couple of months after she posted on Instagram about wanting more “balance” from 2026. You can understand the impulse: Since she began releasing mixtapes in 2010, when she was 16, Simz has been going nonstop, releasing a swath of albums and EPs; touring frequently; working with high-fashion houses like Miu Miu and Burberry; and acting in projects like Top Boy (the Drake-produced Netflix revival of the British crime drama) and Steve (the 2025 Netflix film starring Cillian Murphy). Her career went stratospheric in 2021, when her Mercury Prize-winning album Sometimes I Might Be Introvert topped numerous year-end lists, followed quickly by 2022’s No Thank You, a piquant critique of the music industry. Lotus draws from yet another painful experience — it’s largely a pummeling account of her falling out with former friend and longtime producer Inflo — but clear-eyed intensity firmly cemented Simz as one of the U.K.’s most formidable working artists.

“If the tap’s flowing, I think you’ve got to just keep that momentum, because once you stop, it’s really hard to get back into it,” she says of her prolific clip. Making music “genuinely fuels me. It genuinely is my therapy. It’s how I like to process my thoughts and feelings, so I always make sure I give time to that.”

It’s been this way since she was a teenager growing up in North London. She started rapping at Mary’s Youth Club — a community center where kids can perform, play sports, and attend enrichment programs — and began recording at home with a bare-bones studio setup. She still remembers the first time she stepped onstage, in the sports hall at St Mary’s, to perform early songs of hers with titles like “Achieve, Achieve, Achieve” and “R.E.S.P.E.C.T., Respect That.” “Those were my hits back in the day, them sh*ts were rocking,” she says, laughing. “I just remember feeling really embraced and really supported. I already had people on my side backing it, who believed in me and wanted to see me go far.”

“It’s not normal to have so much attention on you, so many eyes on you, especially at a young age. That can be very distorting.”

Simz still feels a connection to her DIY past, in part because she hasn’t really upgraded her home recording kit. “It’s the same setup I had when I was 17 — a pair of monitors [from the] same brand, laptop, interface, mic. I don’t really need much, as long as I can get out what I’m trying to say, and then I can take it into a studio.” But maintaining a connection to her younger self is also an essential part of her process. “Sometimes, when I’m starting a new project, I might listen to an old tape on SoundCloud or something, just to understand who I am,” she says. “Life goes so fast, and these albums are like my journals, you know? It’s like flicking through old photos or something and you’re like, ‘Oh, I remember that top I used to wear.’”

“It does get hard to be optimistic about the future when there’s a lot of sh*t going on in the world. You feel like: This is f*cked.”

It’s all in service, Simz says, of protecting her creative spirit in an industry that works hard to take it from you, and which often prizes statistics and sales achievements over originality. “Mate, you will lose yourself and you will find yourself and you will lose yourself and you will find yourself, lose yourself, find yourself — it’s just what it is, do you know what I mean?” she says. “It’s not normal to have so much attention on you, so many eyes on you, especially sometimes at a young age. That can be very distorting. So for me, it’s nice to have reminders of like, ‘Nah, this is who I am.’”

And sometimes, she says, “you got to step away from it” entirely. Earlier this year, she took a trip to Sri Lanka, something she’s always wanted to do, with her mom and a close friend. “I travel so much for work, and I’m grateful I get to see the world and all this beauty, but sometimes I don’t get to take in places as much as I would like to,” she says. Volunteering and teaching there with the humanitarian charity Foundation of Goodness provided another kind of reset. “It does get hard to be optimistic about [the future] when you’re a bit distracted, when there’s a lot of sh*t going on in the world that you feel like… this is f*cked,” she says. “But I’ve found a way to try and keep the hope and keep the faith, and do what I can within my power.”

“These albums are like my journals, like flicking through old photos. You’re like, ‘Oh, I remember that top I used to wear.’”

Her pace hasn’t slowed that much. She’s already plotting new music — “I was thinking about the follow-up to Lotus when I was making it” — though she offers no hints; she doesn’t want to promise she’ll go in one direction in case she decides to veer in another. “I don’t want to be married to anything,” she says. “I want to be loose, and I think that’s more exciting to me.”

She’s equally coy about whether she’ll delve further into film and TV. When I ask if she has aspirations toward screenwriting or directing, she gives me another tight-lipped smile. “If you’re in a creative field, it’s very easy for you to want to lean into different mediums, you know?” she says. “With a lot of my peers, people that I really respect within music, within art, within fashion, it’s very normal. It’s very normal to want to be a multidisciplinary artist. So whichever medium allows me to tell my story, I’m down.”

Ultimately, what she wants next is very simple: no limitations. That’s how she felt on Lotus, when she experimented with new genres without any concern for what fans or critics might think — and listeners were all the better for it. “When I look back at my catalogue, I’ll be like, ‘That’s so sick, you done that, that’s so hard!’ You know? You done what you wanted to do, and that’s always gonna exist in the world, and you wasn’t afraid,” she says. “Maybe someone else will feel like they can cross-pollinate genres in their own way and their own style, and not feel limited, like, ‘You can’t rap a 16-bar over classical.’ Because who’s done that?”

“But why not? You just try sh*t and then it might actually work,” she says, beaming. “It’s art!”

Top Image credit: Willy Chavarria clothing; Ami Paris scarf; CC-Steding ring (right hand); Octi ring (left hand); Burberry boots