If ever a voice exhorted you to exclaim “Cheer up — it might never happen”, it’s the vulnerable South London brogue of Speech Debelle. The only problem is that one line into her debut album, it becomes clear that it already has. Searching begins: “2am in my hostel bed/My eyes still red/My belly ain’t fed”. The sound, by virtue of Debelle’s voice and not much else, is hip-hop. But there are no samples or sequencers here, just a doleful acoustic guitar and a restive, hair-shirt rhythm tapped out on brushes, shading in the details of what, in any life, could only be called an almighty low: an uncomfortable familiarity with the immune systems of crack babies and accommodation that comes shared with “cat-sized rats”.

If you know nothing about Speech Debelle, it doesn’t matter. As the title indicates, not a tune on Speech Therapy goes by without the revelation of more back story. Eight half-siblings, expulsion from school and an absent father no doubt account for much of the hug-me hurt, startlingly so on Daddy’s Little Girl on which — care of the ensemble gathered by the producer Wayne Lotek — muted electric piano eddies around a direct address to the father, with a chorus that stretches the fabric of bearability with just two lines: “I am daddy’s little girl/That makes me tough.”

Having reluctantly acquired the muscles of self-sufficiency, Debelle can’t be blamed for flexing them. On Bad Boy she focuses her gaze on the suburban serial offender, whose “mind believes he’s a product of the things he’s seen/Nobody told him he’s as free as the air he breathes”. Better still is The Key, whose spirit-swelling declaration of independence bounds along with a dewy jazz zip that passingly reinvents her as a one-woman Tribe Called Quest.

If she never uttered another word into a microphone, Debelle could content herself with the knowledge that she said it all on Speech Therapy’s penultimate track. Finish This Album starts with a thumbnail lyrical sketch of passengers on a bus, spidering out into a rhapsodic note to self, Debelle balancing regrets about the past with worries about the children she has yet to have, like a South London hybrid of Lauryn Hill and Tracy Chapman.

But if she feels she lacked affection from some quarters as a child, it doesn’t seem to have affected her ability to express it. Offering a moment of unmitigated levity, the lyrics of Buddy Love preserve the spark of new love long enough for the world to marvel at it. It looks rather a lot like what many more of us are going to feel about this extraordinary album.

(Big Dada, TS £10.76)

www.timesselects.co.uk/music

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