There’s something about a female MC that promises so much more than yet another bragging, borderline misogynist, tired beats and lazy-flow merchant, with no self-awareness or dress sense. When we flick through the hip-hop CDs on our dusty shelves, it’s inevitably the girls we’re drawn back to; and the British girls at that: Monie Love, Cookie Crew, the all-too few recordings of Skitz girl Wildflower, Nottingham’s C-Mone. Hell, even Betty Boo. Well, especially Betty Boo actually.

Even with high hopes, 25-year-old London girl, Speech Debelle’s debut album is a revelation. With a musical palette even wider than The Roots (but occupying a similar headspace), Speech’s passive but focussed tone rolls naturally over understated beats, breezy folk-pop, subtle strings and late-night pianos, in collaboration with producer Wayne Lotek and the likes of Roots Manuva, Micachu and, most surprisingly, Tuung.

There are echoes of Plan B’s dark tales of abandonment and hurt in her songs, which sound troublingly autobiographical. While the subject matter is familiar, her storytelling is cliché free. But it’s her voice that’s keeps us returning to ‘Speech Therapy’ on an almost daily basis: conversational yet effortlessly musical and rhythmically inventive, Speech often sounds as if she’s recording these raps in secret – quietly so as not to be evicted from some grimy bedsit.

This is a really special record, guaranteed a place in our end-of-year best-of list and extremely worthy of its new home on our dusty hip-hop shelf. And that’s not a euphemism.

myspace.com/speechdebellemusic