Real Back In Style

London street rap in the 2010s and 2020s can be a pretty bleak business but there’s not many stare straight into that bleakness as directly as Algerian/Irish/Brit MC Jamel Bousbaa aka Potter Payper. Over five mixtapes, he became one of the UK’s favourite documenters of the narcotics economy — and impressively, signed to Def Jam, his first album proper loses none of the rawness. Where many rap / drill artists can gloss over violence and exploitation with cartoonish bravado and off-the-shelf self-help language about redemption, PP digs deep into the dirtiest, saddest, most tiring aspects of poverty, addiction and the legal and penal system, and acknowledges the harms of his own actions without flinching. Which is not to say it’s all struggle: he can do real hip hop triumphalism with he best — but it’s always woven in and out of the gritty, gross realities, to create moods as ambiguous as his snaggle-toothed grin on the cover. He wrestles with the contradictions constantly, but the fact he doesn’t come up with easy answers just makes this deeply troubling record all the more powerful.