Slowthai HHV Records 10 Items

Grime beats and lyrical mania

It was the year 2019: the UK’s exit from the EU was in full swing, the word ‘Brexit’ was driving international timelines and hardening political fronts in the country. In the midst of this political chaos, Tyron Kaymone Frampton from Northampton released his debut album and stood out with his far from subtle lyrics. The fact that the title of the album was Nothing Great About Britain already hinted at what the rapper, known as Slowthai, thought of the political situation. His growing fanbase earned him a nomination for the prestigious Mercury Prize in the same year, and at the award concert, he held up a prepared head resembling Prime Minister Boris Johnson and declared, “Fuck Boris Johnson, fuck everything, and there ain’t nothing great about Britain.” Years before his national breakthrough, Frampton began studying Music Technology in 2011, but his heart primarily lay in his friend’s home studio, where he recorded his first tracks when he wasn’t scraping by with odd jobs. The sessions led to his first single release, Jiggle, in 2016, and the first EP, I Wish I Knew, was released on a small indie label a year later. Over dark grime beats, Slowthai navigated through menacing and almost manic lyrics with untamed flow energy, and his wild and explosive live performances were causing a sensation.

Revolutionary politics and revolutionary music

At Method Records, he released the RUNT EP in 2018 and a year later, Nothing Great About Britain, which propelled him to the fourth spot on BBC’s Sound of 2019 list – the youth started becoming interested in Slowthai’s direct and aggressive political rap. One of his self-proclaimed goals was to make young Britons aware of their political power – his friend and producer, Mura Masa, described it as follows: “There are two things you need when governments aren’t working for the people: revolutionary politics and revolutionary music.” Slowthai proved that art and revolution can go hand in hand, not only with Boris Johnson’s head during his Mercury Prize performance – for the promotion of his debut album, he plastered posters all over London, presenting facts about the increased inequality in the country since the 2016 referendum. Frampton rightfully said about it: “What does it matter about us being part of a union when we can’t resolve the issues in our country?” His radical hatred towards the political Brexit protagonists is not baseless, but rather rooted in the circumstances of his daily life – Slowthai reflects on his fatherless and isolated childhood in tracks like Northampton’s Child, emphasizing the personal dimension of the social difficulties overshadowed by the Brexit turmoil.

Artist instead of politician

In 2020, the Gorillaz invited the young Englishman to feature on the track Momentary Bliss, and in the same year, he won an NME Award as Hero of the Year. His appearance at the ceremony went viral on Twitter after Slowthai made suggestive remarks to the stand-up host and nearly got into a fight with an audience member. The preview of his second album, TYRON, in 2021 was accordingly bitter. However, with an introspective work that didn‘t shy away from pop elements, he turned the tide for his now millions-strong audience. Frampton embarked on a continuation of his revolutionary debut, and the album serves as a mirror of new beginnings, where he reflects on his own mental issues while gathering guest appearances from artists like Skepta, A$AP Rocky and James Blake. And even more than his political actions, the artist polarizes with his musical decisions on his third album, UGLY, in 2023. Experiments with paranoid electro beats coexist with grunge guitars and indie-pop ballads, often placing his own self-doubts at the forefront of the lyrics. Slowthai has long departed from the purely political anti-Brexit stance of his early days, as he primarily wants to be perceived as an artist. “I wasn’t ever a politician,” he says himself.