The Soft-Edged Sentiment of Saam Sultan

Intention is a word that orbits around Saam Sultan's music. It's also layered, smooth, and precise. There are ribbons of softness as well as structure and at moments, feels all too delicate and intrusive to break into. This mille-feuille of artistry is a product of a scene evolving in real time. As it gently shapes him and his sound, it feels like the type of thing that the UK underground scene has been waiting for for a while to become obsessed with. Quietly being acknowledged over the last few years, Saam Sultan is becoming one of the defining voices of a new wave of musicians. 

Saam’s weightless and emotionally immersive sound is rooted in self-awareness amongst a hyper-digital generation. Although unintentionally being a face of helping revive the cloud rap era, that was never really his objective when creating music. Breaking through with tracks like ‘ydoifeel?’ and ‘locked in love’, Saam has created a world that feels equally cinematic and intimate. His influences stretch far beyond rap, drawing from the orchestral intensity of Hans Zimmer and the expansive euphoric ambience of Pink Floyd; references that explain the grandeur, vulnerability, and emotional depth running through his sonics.

Fresh off the stage from a milestone moment in his career - his first sold-out headline show in London and on the brink of the release of his latest EP Seraphim - we get the chance to sit with Saam Sultan and uncover how he’s redefining what his scene sounds and feels like in 2026. 

Images shot by the author

When I sat down with Saam in the green room in the basement of The Lower Third, the room hummed with overlapping voices and fragments of conversations from his friends, DJs and team alike. Myself and Saam cop a spot at the dressing table adorned with warm bulbs, illuminating a corner in the dim room. Wearing a long, black leather jacket, jeans and a pale pink fuzzy hoodie, he looked fatigued but content. The adrenaline of his sold-out headline show in London still clung to the walls as he spoke softly so as not to disrupt his voice any further. Just half an hour earlier, Saam was delivering a lively performance to fans who were screaming and dancing so intensely, they toppled over on another as they lost themselves in the chaos.

“I’m feeling knackered!” he laughs. “It was super hot in there but it was super fun. I think everyone in there was so full of energy and it was nice to see everyone knowing the lyrics… the show sold out quite quickly as well so I guess everyone there loves my music.” And surprisingly, you’d think he’s done this many times before by the way he commanded the room. After playing a series of older tracks from his discography, he played his new EP Seraphim from top to bottom for the crowd. I noticed a very interesting dynamic of sounds that weren’t all that reminiscent of his previous tracks. Tuning into his calm demeanour that contrasted his electric presence on stage, I remembered how he sat closely with his partner and shared anecdotes with his mother on the different songs he was playing out of his phone to get in the right headspace. “I just like listening to the classics and music that I love listening to. It could be some of my music, it could be Queen, Marvin Gaye… whoever. That helps me get into the mood.”

Before going on stage, Saam tends to avoid anything high-energy, and these quieter songs hold a certain gravity as many are records that were passed down through his parents - especially his mother - that were woven into his childhood, shaping his ear long before he ever began making songs of his own. “I definitely bite a lot of her swag and her music taste” he says with gratitude as his mum has consistently shown up as his biggest supporter. “I mean, my mum told me to drop out of college, so she really believed in me and I think that’s the biggest privilege - having parents that believe in you. You can be so talented but if your parents don’t support you… I think the biggest privilege is having them to fall back on. My own mother and father supporting me so heavily and allowing me to do what I want to do, what I’ve always dreamed of and giving me that space is the biggest blessing I could have asked for.” His admiration beams through as he speaks of her vital presence in every step of the process, from his fashion, decision making, and his jewellery where he shows me his belt that glints in the dressing room mirror lights. It's a rectangular-shaped, wavy silver buckle. Then he shows me his hands, also adorned with silver decorative rings with encapsulated various coloured stones. Despite the belt-buckle-polished world he creates now, producing was never second nature to him. Like everyone else, he began at the very beginning. He tries to convince me that once upon a time, the music he made was actually quite bad.

Saam began making music at nine-years-old on Ableton Live and loved the possibilities of what he could produce, and continued to progress all the way into college. Initially he took towards the producing side of things such as creating beats and instrumentals. “For me, it was like film scoring sound stuff and I was great at that, but vocally I never really tried to do things. A lot of producers make instrumentals and then think they aren’t capable of being the artist as well and I couldn’t accept that.” Entering his teen years, he began to hone in on vocals and taught himself how to sing to an extent. By the time he was 17, he was travelling up to London from Brighton almost every day, running on four hours of sleep, staying in the studio till almost sunrise mixing and producing for other people. It was then when he created the track ‘I SEE STARS’ in 2024 before he thought he should release something himself. Nine months after that track and a few other singles, ‘ydoifeel?’ dropped. This amalgamation of something Clams Casino would have produced with a shred of rap, emulating the Opium label very quickly became a fan favourite, and was instantly connected to the cloud rap revival that began a few years back.  

“Wait, your mum put you onto [Playboy] Carti?” I ask, surprised. I looked over at the sweet lady sitting not too far from us. “Yeah! Her spectrum of taste goes very far.” Saam smiles. “I always loved a lot of cloud rap but it wasn’t the genre I explicitly listened to. I remember one day I just found this song, and a lot of people reference Clams Casino, but for me I’m actually a very big Flume fan.” Moulding together Flume’s weightless production and the blurred nostalgia of Clams Casino in his A$AP Rocky-era, it became distilled into something his own. But that’s not to say Saam doesn’t want to be connected to the cloud rap scene, and he believes that it’s a great feeling to be part of something that’s quite special to many people. “I think it’s super cool. I remember when I first dropped ‘ydoifeel?’ at the time it was just me and [fake] Mink and a couple of other people. I had this moment and then a couple of months later, Mink just blew up and it was sick to see! Plus all these eyes being put on the scene. I think the music that I’m making now isn’t necessarily any different, it’s just that I’m showcasing a wider spectrum of what I can do.”

Interestingly with his new EP Seraphim, it edges away slightly from the UK rap focused sound and it's more airy and even more experimental if you look into the details. As mentioned before that he draws influence from Hans Zimmer and perhaps Jeff Buckley, he searches for true influence in the style of vocals from specific artists and that is evident in his new project. “Jeff Buckley's cool… but it’s probably a little bit more Pink Floyd-y, which he was a big fan of as well. I think a lot of psychedelic, rock opera like Queen and Freddie Mercury and that style of vocal resonates deeply with me. It’s not necessarily the artist themselves, but it’s the soul in the music.”

He states that emotion and lyricism are extremely important, as well as intention. Considering that he started out with an interest in film scores, Hans Zimmer doesn’t seem like too much of an unlikely inspiration. On the flip side, he notes composer Bach as his unlikely source as he found himself drawing towards classical music because of how layered it can be. “I think the dynamics in classic music definitely inspired me. Nowadays, everything’s very over-compressed and the music can sometimes sound sort of flat. In the production stage, you have all these limiters and all these things in the music that prevent it from having dynamics like getting loud and then quiet. Everyone wants things to maintain consistent volume. I’ve tried my hardest, at least recently, to try and have as many dynamics in the music as possible because for me, that portrays the most emotion and you can really feel the music.”

Drawing from an eclectic pool of influences, Saam’s sound feels shaped just as much by geography as it does by music itself. Having lived between Barbados, Florida and the UK, his artistry carries traces of each place, blending different tempos, emotional textures and cultural perspectives into something difficult to pin down. Interestingly, his relationship with rap developed far outside the traditional UK canon. Unlike us, when Saam was growing up, artists like Novelist, JME or even Skepta were not part of his musical foundation at all. Instead, he gravitated toward the experimentation of OutKast and the individuality of Lil Wayne whilst indulging in the US rap realm. It’s only more recently, he says, that he’s begun fully indulging UK rap from within the culture itself.

That being said, Seraphim isn’t ‘rappy’ in the traditional sense. For someone discovering Saam through this project alone, it might come as a surprise to revisit his earlier catalogue, where flashes of his technical rap ability sit much more visibly at the forefront. Here, those instincts feel more dissolved into atmosphere and emotion rather than performance. It raises an interesting question: is Seraphim the end of a beginning? A quiet farewell to one era of his artistry, or simply the natural continuation of the influences that have always existed beneath the surface? Rather than abandoning rap entirely, the project feels more like Saam loosening his boundaries and allowing melody and ambience to take up more space in a more calculated way than before. 

“I think the EP is just all the music that I like to make and what ties the thread between this idea of euphoria. I put that feeling into all of the music and for me, my music is a spectrum of that.” Saam affirms. “But I don't approach music from a genre-specific way. A lot of the music I'm putting out now is music I've actually been making for years, but I haven't put the music out rapidly enough for people to see that showcase… I want my catalogue to just be a display of my taste. And even if you align with my taste, you don't have to listen to everything. If you love songs like ‘locked in love’, listen to ‘locked in love’. If you want more of that and I don't have enough of that, then there are other artists. That's why there’s other musicians, you know? So we can all have the chance to display that feeling.” 

“Seraphim” is a word loaded with spiritual significance, traditionally referring to one of the highest-ranking angelic beings or figures believed to exist closest to God. Fittingly, the first song Saam created for the project became its title track, setting the tone for everything that followed. His interpretation stretches beyond religion in the conventional sense. While he’s drawn to the divinity associated with the word, Saam also believes that everyone carries a form of God within themselves. For him, music becomes the closest expression of that godliness like something invisible but deeply felt and capable of transcending languages. “When I think about God, I just think about the feeling of euphoria. Just peace and happiness. There's so much war in this world and so many people that are going through so much struggle and hardship. I’m speaking through my emotions right now, but also the perspective of somebody else in this world who would've felt the same things that I feel right now.” To put it simply, the purpose is to rehumanise people. We’re all here to love and learn and many things we consume blur that meaning. Believing that music being close to Godliness is why he settled on Seraphim. 

And when you listen to that project and perhaps the music that came before, all Saam hopes for is that people can allow themselves to fully sit with that feeling and to recognise the parts of themselves the music reaches toward. At its core, the project leans toward optimism. Saam speaks openly about the idea that negativity rarely creates anything meaningful, and that perspective has ultimately shaped the direction of Seraphim. More than anything, he wants listeners to come away from it feeling grounded in gratitude, reminded of the beauty that still exists in the world, and how fortunate we are to experience even the smallest parts of it. Whether that moment finds you alone, reflecting on where you are in life or surrounded by friends in a moment of joy, its intention will always remain the same.