Sampha / Process / 2017
Incomplete Kisses
woozy, melancholic, quietly urgent
A hazy meditation on emotional withholding and grief, where domestic decay becomes a metaphor for a relationship (or a life) slowly losing signal. Sampha moves between intimate address and a strange, dreamlike aerial vantage, using surreal imagery to talk about the cost of not finishing what needs to be said before someone is gone.
emotional avoidance grief and mortality domestic decay dissociation urgency of unspoken feeling
Who's speaking
A narrator addresses a 'you' who is close to him—possibly a lover, possibly a parent or family member near death—shifting between ground-level intimacy and a detached, almost omniscient overhead view. The voice is tender but anxious, aware that time and honesty are running out.
What happens
The song opens inside a failing household, described through unfinished affection and physical/technological decay. That domestic scene gives way to direct pleas about not suppressing one's inner truth, before the perspective suddenly lifts into an aerial, dreamlike image involving a child at a cemetery who resembles the addressee. The song then folds back into its opening images, suggesting a cycle rather than resolution.
How it's built
The song uses a loose verse–refrain structure built on repetition rather than a conventional verse/chorus/bridge shape. The 'incomplete kisses' phrase recurs like an incantation, and the second half essentially recycles the opening verse, creating a closed loop that mirrors the stuck, unresolved emotional state being described. The bird's-eye/cemetery image functions as the song's only real departure—a brief visionary break before it returns to the domestic scene.
Section by section
Opening verse
“in this house we're sinking”
The domestic setting is established through decay rather than description—things glitching, dimming, sinking—while the people inside are too emotionally numb to intervene, setting up the song's core tension between feeling and paralysis.
First refrain
The recurring phrase about unfinished affection becomes a kind of chant, less a lyric than a wound being touched repeatedly. Its vagueness is deliberate; the listener never learns exactly what these kisses were, only that their incompleteness has weight.
Middle verse
“wait too long you'll miss it”
Here the song turns explicitly didactic, warning against emotional suppression. The wordplay linking missing an opportunity to being missed after death suggests the stakes are not just romantic but existential.
Bird's-eye passage
“a child stood at the cemetery”
This is the song's most disorienting turn, pulling the narrator (and listener) out of the room and into an overhead, almost spiritual vantage. The child resembling the addressee blurs identity across time, hinting at inherited grief or a vision of mortality rather than a literal scene.
Final plea and return
“don't you leave me here”
The cry of abandonment breaks through the song's otherwise controlled, hazy tone before the lyrics fold back into the opening verse, ending not with resolution but with recurrence—suggesting the emotional loop has not been broken.
Craft
- metaphor
- The sinking, glitching house stands in for a relationship or household losing vitality, with technological failure suggesting a breakdown in communication or presence.
- anaphora
- The repeated instruction not to hide one's story functions as incantatory pleading, reinforcing the song's central anxiety through insistent repetition.
- surreal imagery
- The sudden aerial view and the child at the cemetery break the song's domestic realism, introducing a dreamlike register that suggests premonition, memory, or death.
- circular structure
- The return to the opening lines at the song's end enacts the very stuckness the lyrics describe—an inability to move past the incomplete moment.
Reading it
The most persuasive reading treats the song as being about the danger of emotional withholding within an intimate relationship, using domestic decay and technological glitching as symbols of disconnection that could curdle into something like death if left unaddressed. A second, equally credible reading—supported by the cemetery and child imagery—hears this less as romantic advice and more as a meditation on mortality and grief, possibly anticipatory grief for a parent, where 'incomplete kisses' means unfinished goodbyes rather than unfinished romance. The song does not resolve which reading is correct, and its power partly depends on that ambiguity.
Context
Process was written in the period surrounding the death of Sampha's mother, and grief runs through much of the album explicitly. While this song is less directly biographical than tracks like the album's more overt meditations on his mother's illness, its imagery of a child resembling the addressee at a cemetery plausibly connects to that same emotional context, though this cannot be stated with certainty from the lyric alone.
Listen for
- the way the repeated phrase never fully resolves melodically, mirroring the theme of incompleteness
- the sonic glitches and production choices that mimic the lyrical imagery of a failing TV and dimming lights
- the shift in vocal register or production texture during the bird's-eye/cemetery section
- how the song's return to its opening lines is handled musically—whether it feels like closure or like being trapped
About Sampha
Sampha Lahai Sisay is a British singer, songwriter, musician and record producer from Morden, South London. Sampha has collaborated with Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Frank Ocean, SBTRKT, Jessie Ware, Alicia Keys, Gorillaz, Florence + the Machine, Travis Scott, Kanye West, Daniel Caesar, Solange and others.
b. 1988 / United Kingdom
Full biography and catalogue