“I’m coming back with the confidence of knowing who I am.” When Sampa Tembo, known globally as Sampa the Great, says this, it carries the calm assurance of someone who has done the work of coming home to herself. After years of building an acclaimed international career, she’s no longer seeking validation or belonging. Her forthcoming, third studio album, Nu Zamrock marks that return: bold and spiritually charged, blending hip-hop, rock, soul, and Kalindula rhythms into what she calls Nu Zamrock, a sound that bridges generations, geographies, and selves. Sampa the Great’s ascent was meteoric. From The Great Mixtape to Birds and the BEE9, she emerged as one of hip-hop’s most distinctive voices - fearless, poetic, and unflinchingly honest. With The Return (2019) and As Above, So Below (2022), she became a globally recognised artist, earning multiple ARIA Awards & two Australian Music Prizes, gracing some of the world’s biggest stages, from Coachella and Glastonbury to NPR’s Tiny Desk, Later… With Jools Holland and Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, and seeing her music soundtrack massive commercial campaigns from Marvel Studios’ Black Panther to FC26 & Fornite, all accompanied by praise from tastemakers worldwide. Yet as her career flourished, a quiet uncertainty grew. Sampa was born in Zambia, raised in Botswana, and then travelled to Australia for university, to start her career. Then, the pandemic brought a pause and, with it, a decision to move back to Zambia marked a pivotal shift in her artistry, a re-rooting of sorts. It was there, back in her homeland, that her confidence finally settled into something unshakable. In reconnecting, Sampa also began to see the broader story of where her music comes from, not just Zambia, but the continent itself. “Africa is the greatest ghostwriter of all time,” she reflects, “inspiring millions but getting none of the credit.” That realisation became a turning point: to tell her story fully, she would have to tell Africa’s too — not as muse, but as author. Then came the discovery that reframed her whole creative identity. While reconnecting with family, Sampa learned that her blood uncle, George Kunda (Groovy Joe), was a founding member of Zambia’s legendary psychedelic rock band WITCH, pioneers of the 1970s movement known as Zamrock. “I really could have used this information when I was starting out!” she laughs. “When I learned that, it felt spiritual - like there was this ancestral baton being passed. Once I found out I had a blood connection to it, I felt like I’d been given permission to inherit it.” That inheritance became the heartbeat of Nu Zamrock. Across the album she reimagines the genre - that daring fusion of rock, funk, and African rhythm - through her own lens, merging it with hip-hop, poetry, and soul to create Nu Zamrock, a form both ancestral and futuristic. “Zamrock is my sound,” she says. “It’s my voice. Being Zambian, being loud, being defiant — that’s what Zamrock is.