New Music – The King of London

Skepta has had quite the impressive year following the release of several editorials on him from companies like The Fader, Masked Gorilla, and Vice, where they featured an actual documentary on his rise from the underground streets of London to the top of the music world touring sold out shows all around different countries. With the release of his newest work Konnichiwa, it appears that Skepta is not just here to stay, but here to rule the game as well.

Konnichiwa is a 12-track album that is packed with some really interesting uses of frequency instruments like 808 drums and synthesizers. The combination creates some dark and grimy beats which is what Skepta is primarily known for as the “King of Grime.”

Skepta is a breath of fresh air to the hip-hop genre, he brings some hard hitting banging beats that rattle subsystems that still reside in my head even now. The production on Konnichiwa is just so well flowing with the skits weaved into the songs to bring some downright laughable moments with Drake’s “Trust me Daddy” and even an interview focusing on the 2015 BRIT Awards where a reporter explained how it became “A bunch of young men all dressed in black dancing extremely aggressively on stage…”

Konnichiwa is more about his personal life and how he much he has gained and unfortunately lost in the come up of his career. He reflects on how he “Came a long way from sittin’ in the flats,” and is doing a substantial amount of times better than he could have been without music. Even the album cover art represents Skepta on a stamp with the words “First Class London” to represent he is now a part of London Royalty. I have always been a fan of grimy or dark music, but I would have never expected to see exactly where someone could go with that genre. Skepta has reached new heights with his music and seems to not show any signs of slowing down.

I really only have one problem with Konnichiwa, and that is just that one song in particular is just something I couldn’t get into. The track “Ladies Hit Squad” is just not a song that I could honestly feel and the first time I heard it I actually laughed because it feels so out of place. It is a club sounding song while the rest of the songs on this album is a barrage of loud bass and aggressive lyrics. The final song, “Text Me Back” is also a slowed down love-style, but I actually liked this and I thought it was a welcome closer to the album. For some strange reason I just was not a huge fan of “Ladies Hit Squad,” but honestly I am not a huge fan of the radio-friendly love songs.

Konnichiwa as a whole is just such a substantial album with only one track that I wasn’t a huge fan of. It turned me onto the London Rap Scene and allowed me to experiment more with my music taste. I seriously recommend this to anyone who is a fan of rap music as it has some great production, great lyrics, and some of the coolest uses of sampling for just skit purposes that I have heard in a long time. Skepta is an artist that people should really look forward to, and see what the King of London has in the future.