Review: SKYE NEWMAN - "SE9 Part 2"

SkyeNewman_SE9PART2-album-2026.

There is a specific trend that runs through British music of the last twenty years: singers who use their voice as an instrument of confession, who transform experience into soulful pop without seeking the distance of fiction.

Adele made him a model, Amy Winehouse had already demonstrated it with a different urgency. Skye Newman, 22, South East London, SE9 as a postcode and as an autobiography, is the most recent and among the most credible heirs.

“Family Matters”, his second single, reached number five in the British charts in the spring of 2025. Then the support for Ed Sheeran, Lewis Capaldi, Harry Styles in Australia. Two BRIT Award nominations and winning BBC Sound of 2026 before even having a full album. All this before “SE9 Part 2”, which comes out today and closes the debut project opened seven months ago with the first part.

The album works because Newman doesn't build a character: he tells. SE9 Part 1 were stories of childhood and adolescence, family traumas, the house moved several times between South East London and Kent, the life of the youngest of six siblings. Part 2 shifts the point of view: it is no longer pain as raw material, but growth, self-conscious choice, the ability to get out of situations that have hurt.

Woman I Amthe single that opens this second chapter, is built around the female friendships that have kept it going, the family you choose when your original one isn't enough. The production is deliberately essential: nothing distracts from the voice and what it says.

This is where Newman earns attention and respect. Not in the originality of the formula, which is quite consolidated within this genre, but in the honesty with which he inhabits it.

The voice has real weight, it's not an effect. The writing is direct without being flat. When she says “they trained me, supported me and accompanied me in every step”, it doesn't seem like a slogan: it seems like someone who really believes it.

“SE9 Part 2” is not a record that reinvents anything. It's a record that does what it promises well, with a protagonist who has already demonstrated that she knows exactly where she wants to go. At 22 years old, with this baggage already on my shoulders, it's a serious premise.