How completely can you submit to desire without abandoning the self? That is the central question of Besides you, the second EP by Kenyan rapper and singer tg.blk. “Why do I have to think about you every time I dream,” she sings on “So Bad”, a song about earnest desire stopping short of indignance. Over an indulgent bedroom-R&B production—atmospheric piano accents, cushioning synths, patient, light drums—her needy falsetto makes desire audible and drama-free. On “Besides You (inside)”, desire skips past attraction and straight to total romantic and sexual awakening: “I’m diving in feet first/Don’t care if my heart hurt/’Cos I really need her.” If that desire has momentum on “Flip It Twist It Bop It!”, tequila, Bacardi and other substances remove the last brakes. Locked piano figures and chugging shakers maintain a steady march while she grows more intoxicated and more explicit: “Do you want to fuck me?” It is part-rhetorical, part come-on, all sung in Macy Gray-like trap-falsetto cadence that flips, twists and bops. “My bitch so bad I walk around with a rocket,” she sings on “Stop It”, a brag from inside a love nest. Bright sounds—whistling bell synths and rattling trap snares—find ample room in a spacious, skeletal beat. It shares a lolling, languid production with “Squeeze me?”, where desire is indistinguishable from devotion. “She want to eat me up, I want to be in love,” she confesses, overlapping appetites. But wanton desire need not be unguarded: “If I sound corny, would you change your mind and judge me?” she wonders, straddling submission and self-possession. On EP closer “Clutch My Bag”, attitude and production observe the same principle—composure with some displacement. “I clutch my pearls when I’m out in the evening/I got shit to lose and you bitches stay scheming,” she declares, unfazed, over displaced percussion and a guitar-piano melodic hand-off.