![]() ![]() ![]() “So there’s a filter that I, as an artist, need to know how to balance. “I talk all my shit in my music, but I talk my shit to represent the pain,” Unknown T, who was wrongly accused of fatally stabbing a student at a New Year’s Eve party in 2018, says in between bites. He’s currently working on an upcoming mixtape called Adolescence, which embraces this new iteration of melodic rap music. Unknown T, the 21-year-old musician born Daniel Lena, is having french fries at his home in the Homerton district of London when we meet over Zoom. The artists that are succeeding are those that have learnt how to do that and navigate that really well.” “That is a subtle reason for why there’s this commercialized, sheened version of drill that’s now popped up. “Rappers got smarter with their lyrics,” Thapar says. The moral panic, combined with the incarceration or death of many of the genre’s first stars, pushed a more palatable version of the sound to the forefront. began using drill artists’ songs and music videos against them in legal cases, blaming the explicit lyrics for a rise in murder, knife crime, and gang activity. ![]() Police and government officials in the U.K. “It was a war report of what was going on in these communities.” “They were able to decipher every single detail about what street or what block or what incident or what school were in these songs,” Thapar says. According to Ciaran Thapar, a writer and youth worker whose upcoming book, Cut Short: Youth Violence, Loss and Hope in the City, explores the British government’s demonization of drill music and young Black men, teenagers in South London were fixated on drill as early as 2017. “I like my crumble with some custard,” Unknown T sings on NSG’s single “Kate Winslet” others reference the culture and struggles of London’s Southeast Asian, African, and Caribbean diasporas, and the neighborhoods in which they live. The new wave of British rap is indeed markedly British. Now we’ve got a sense of identity, and it’s not about what’s cool anywhere else, because we’ve got it here. We can’t put you on the rap show and play your punk stuff.’ In my head, music’s music,” he says. “Radio, they was being funny at that point, because they was like, ‘We don’t know where to place you. This grab bag of inspiration is apparent in his music, but when he was coming up, in 2017, that eclecticism wasn’t necessarily a good thing. He also name-checks Juicy J and DJ Paul, DIY artists like Daniel Johnston, and punk music as influences. drill artists, (although Slowthai does not identify himself as a drill rapper), coupled with the experimental, alternative elements of Radiohead and Elliott Smith’s thoughtful, at times dark lyrics. Slowthai’s style is influenced by the same sounds that inspire U.K. 1 in the U.K., and A$AP Rocky took note-releasing it via his AWGE imprint in the United States and jumping on the song “MAZZA.” Nothing Great About Britain made such waves internationally that Slowthai canceled his plans to open for English singer-songwriter Liam Gallagher and instead toured with American hip-hop boy band Brockhampton, who then invited him to feature on their song “Heaven Belongs to You.” Slowthai’s entry into the mainstream can be traced to February 2021, when he dropped his second album, Tyron. He released his debut album, Nothing Great About Britain, amid the turmoil of Brexit, sharing his caustic take on the country’s health, economic, and political crises, wealth disparities, and class hostilities. The growing interest in English rap is best exemplified by Slowthai’s career trajectory. And before his untimely death, in February 2020, Pop Smoke, a pioneering Brooklyn artist whom many hailed as the second coming of Tupac, worked almost exclusively with British producers, including AXL Beats. In July 2020, Drake teamed up with Headie One on the track “Only You Freestyle,” the video for which currently has over 28 million views on YouTube. The London rap scene’s newest artists, like Unknown T and Shaybo, are injecting African and West Indian rhythms and melodies, Jamaican dancehall, and even jazz into their songs, creating club-ready bangers that are becoming as popular in Atlanta as they are in Camden Town. Rap artists from the U.K.-including Headie One, Digga D, Ivorian Doll, and Central Cee, along with producers like AXL Beats, M1 on the Beat, and MK the Plug-have carved out their own style of music: one that combines England’s hometown signature grime with drill, a bass-heavy rap subgenre that blew up in Chicago in the early 2010s. Today, the current of influence is flowing in the other direction. ![]()
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