Complex UK’s Best Albums of 2019

“It feels quite sinister,” Kano tells Apple Music about the title of his exceptional sixth album, *Hoodies All Summer*. “But a hoodie’s also like a defense mechanism—a coat of armor, protection from the rain. It’s like we always get rained on but don’t worry, we’re resilient, we wear hoodies all summer. We’re prepared for whatever.” That description is fitting for 10 songs that tear down stereotypes and assumptions to reveal the humanity and bigger picture of life in London’s toughest quarters. On “Trouble” that means reflecting with nuance and empathy on the lives being lost to postcode wars and knife and gun crime. “People become so used to the fact that these situations happen that they are almost numb to it,” he says. “Young kids dying on the street—it gets to a point where it’s like you lose count, and you just move on really quickly and forget a person’s name two minutes after hearing about it.” Like 2016’s *Made in the Manor*, this is an album rooted in his experiences of living in East London. This time, though, the focus is less introspective, with Kano, as he says, “reversing the lens” toward the communities he grew up in. “I just wanted to speak about it in a way where it\'s like, ‘I understand, I get it.’ I\'ll get into the psyche of why people do what they do. It’s about remembering that these unfortunate situations come about because of circumstances that are out of the hands of people involved. Not everyone’s this gang-sign, picture-taking, hoodie-wearing gang member. That’s the way they put us across in the media. Yes, some people are involved in crime, and some people are *not*—they just live in these areas, and it’s a fucked-up situation.” Kano’s at his poetic and potent best here. Lines such as “All our mothers worry when we touch the road/\'Cause they know it’s touch-and-go whether we’re coming home” (“Trouble”) impact fast and deep, but he also spotlights hope amid hard times. “I feel like we’re resilient people and there’s always room for a smile and to celebrate the small wins, and the big wins,” he says. “That’s when you hear \[tracks\] like \'Pan-Fried\' and \'Can\'t Hold We Down\'—you can\'t hold us down, no matter what you do to us, you can\'t stop us. We’re a force, you can\'t stop us creatively. I want more for you: I’ve made it through, I want you to see what I’ve seen. It’s about everyone having the opportunity to see more, so they’ll want more, to feel like they are more.” If the wisdom of Kano’s bars positions him as an elder statesman of UK rap, the album as a whole confirms that he’s an undisputed great of the genre. Musically, it sets new standards in vision and ambition, complementing visceral electronic beats with strings and choirs as it moves through exhilarating left turns and dizzying switches of pace and intensity. “I wanted it to be an exciting listen,” he says. “Like the beat that comes in from nowhere in ‘Teardrops’—it’s like a slap in the face. This ain’t the album that you just put on in the background. I didn\'t want it to be that. You need to dedicate time out of your day to listen to this.”

The more music Dave makes, the more out of step his prosaic stage name seems. The richness and daring of his songwriting has already been granted an Ivor Novello Award—for “Question Time,” 2017’s searing address to British politicians—and on his debut album he gets deeper, bolder, and more ambitious. Pitched as excerpts from a year-long course of therapy, these 11 songs show the South Londoner examining the human condition and his own complex wiring. Confession and self-reflection may be nothing new in rap, but they’ve rarely been done with such skill and imagination. Dave’s riveting and poetic at all times, documenting his experience as a young British black man (“Black”) and pulling back the curtain on the realities of fame (“Environment”). With a literary sense of detail and drama, “Lesley”—a cautionary, 11-minute account of abuse and tragedy—is as much a short story as a song: “Touched her destination/Way faster than the cab driver\'s estimation/She put the key in the door/She couldn\'t believe what she see on the floor.” His words are carried by equally stirring music. Strings, harps, and the aching melodies of Dave’s own piano-playing mingle with trap beats and brooding bass in incisive expressions of pain and stress, as well as flashes of optimism and triumph. It may be drawn from an intensely personal place, but *Psychodrama* promises to have a much broader impact, setting dizzying new standards for UK rap.

After releasing 2016’s *The Colour in Anything*, James Blake moved from London to Los Angeles, where he found himself busier than ever. “I’ve been doing a lot of production work, a lot of writing for other people and projects,” he tells Apple Music. “I think the constant process of having a mirror held up to your music in the form of other people’s music, and other people, helped me cross something. A shiny new thing.” That thing—his fourth album, *Assume Form*—is his least abstract and most grounded, revealing and romantic album to date. Here, Blake pulls back the curtain and explains the themes, stories and collaborations behind each track. **“Assume Form”** “I\'m saying, ‘The plan is to become reachable, to assume material form, to leave my head and join the world.’ It seems like quite a modern, Western idea that you just get lost. These slight feelings of repression lead to this feeling of *I’m not in my body, I’m not really experiencing life through first-person. It’s like I’m looking at it from above*. Which is a phenomenon a lot of people describe when they talk about depression.” **“Mile High” (feat. Metro Boomin & Travis Scott)** “Travis is just exceptionally talented at melodies; the ones he wrote on that track are brilliant. And it was made possible by Metro—the beat is a huge part of why that track feels the way it does.” **“Tell Them” (feat. Metro Boomin & Moses Sumney)** “Moses came on tour with me a couple years ago. I watched him get a standing ovation every night, and that was when he was a support act. For me, it’s a monologue on a one-night stand: There’s fear, there’s not wanting to be too close to anybody. Just sort of a self-analysis, really.” **“Into the Red”** “‘Into the Red’ is about a woman in my life who was very giving—someone who put me before themselves, and spent the last of their money on something for me. It was just a really beautiful sentiment—especially the antithesis of the idea that the man pays. I just liked that idea of equal footing.” **“Barefoot in the Park” (feat. ROSALÍA)** “My manager played me \[ROSALÍA’s 2017 debut\] *Los Ángeles*, and I honestly hadn’t heard anything so vulnerable and raw and devastating in quite a while. She came to the studio, and within a day we’d made two or three things. I loved the sound of our voices together.” **“Can’t Believe the Way We Flow”** “It’s a pure love song, really. It’s just about the ease of coexisting that I feel with my girlfriend. It’s fairly simple in its message and in its delivery, hopefully. Romance is a very commercialized subject, but sometimes it can just be a peaceful moment of ease and something even mundane—just the flow between days and somebody making it feel like the days are just going by, and that’s a great thing.” **“Are You in Love?”** “I like the idea of that moment where neither of you know whether you’re in love yet, but there’s this need for someone to just say they are: ‘Give me assurance that this is good and that we’re good, and that you’re in love with me. I’m in love with you.’ The words might mean more in that moment, but that’s not necessarily gonna make it okay.” **“Where’s the Catch?” (feat. André 3000)** “I was, and remain, inspired by Outkast. Catching him now is maybe even *more* special to me, because the way he writes is just so good! I love the way he balances slight abstraction with this feeling of paranoia. The line ‘Like I know I’m eight, and I know I ain’t’—anxiety bringing you back to being a child, but knowing that you’re supposed to feel strong and stable because you’re an adult now. That’s just so beautifully put.” **“I’ll Come Too”** “It’s a real story: When you fall in love, the practical things go out the window, a little bit. And you just want to go to wherever they are.” **“Power On”** “It’s about being in a relationship, and being someone who gets something wrong. If you can swallow your ego a little bit and accept that you aren’t always to know everything, that this person can actually teach you a lot, the better it is for everyone. Once I’ve taken accountability, it’s time to power on—that’s the only way I can be worthy of somebody’s love and affection and time.” **“Don’t Miss It”** “Coming at the end of the album was a choice. I think it kind of sums up the mission statement in some ways: Yes, there are millions of things that I could fixate on, and I have lost years and years and years to anxiety. There are big chunks of my life I can’t remember—moments I didn’t enjoy when I should have. Loves I wasn’t a part of. Heroes I met that I can’t really remember the feeling of meeting. Because I was so wrapped up in myself. And I think that’s what this is—the inner monologue of an egomaniac.” **“Lullaby for My Insomniac”** “I literally wrote it to help someone sleep. This is just me trying to calm the waters so you can just drift off. It does what it says on the tin.”

Baring her heart on a series of confessional soul-pop tracks had already helped earn Mahalia Burkmar a BRIT nomination, and it’s also given her a reputation as a hopeless romantic—something she’s proud of. “I used to get asked in interviews a lot, always by guys, ‘Are you only ever going to write about love?’” she tells Apple Music. “I was always really confused by that comment, because I’m a 21-year-old girl. That\'s what I care about! Aside from music and my career, I’m thinking about dating, falling in love, and breakups.” Her debut album *Love and Compromise* takes us through these subjects, including chasing a taken man and learning lessons in love from her mum, all with candid intimacy. “It\'s my little diary of all the ways that I\'ve weaved in and out of love and relationships.” Let the singer-songwriter take you on a tour of her debut, track by track. **“Hide Out”** “The album is called *Love and Compromise*. To give you a little bit of backstory, when I was young my mum showed me this clip of an Eartha Kitt interview. The interviewer asks her, ‘Would you ever compromise in a relationship?’ I used to watch this video religiously of her laughing and saying, ‘Why would I ever compromise myself for a man?’ I wanted to use the clip here. She\'s actually saying compromising isn\'t just compromising yourself, sometimes it\'s compromising small things. I love her journey in those two minutes. It’s always resonated with me.” **“I Wish I Missed My Ex”** “When we wrote this song, we all knew that it was cool. It\'s catchy, but no one knew that it was going to do what it did. It went absolutely nuts. When I do shows now, I always end on that song and it\'s just the funniest thing ever. You see all the girls jumping and shaking each other, they scream so loud. As artists, we\'re all waiting for someone to go, ‘You\'re amazing.’ And when you hear it, you don\'t feel it. Some artists do, and I\'m really jealous of that way of thinking. I waited for so long to feel accepted by the industry.” **“Simmer” (feat. Burna Boy)** “I wanted Burna on the song. But DMing Burna Boy as Mahalia was really difficult. After sliding into the DMs twice and not getting an answer, I turned to my manager. One of the perks of being a signed artist is that I can say, ‘I really want this. How do I make it happen?’ I\'m so lucky to have that behind me. He\'s here, there, and everywhere, so trying to be in the same city as Burna Boy is the most difficult thing I\'ve ever done, but I can commend him. He\'s amazing. I\'ve never met somebody so hardworking. We did get to shoot the video together, which was great because we finally got to meet.” **“Good Company”** “I\'m not very good at writing slow jams. I could never write about me in the bedroom getting dirty with a guy, but writing this song, I was trying to say to girls it\'s totally fine to just be like, ‘I want you to come over and hang out with me.’ When I was young, the stories that I heard on the playground, they were always ahead of me in the realm of relationships. I was a slow grower. I wanted to say to girls, you can be in love with somebody and not feel like you have to go that extra mile. And if you want to, that’s also fine. It\'s about teaching girls you can move at your pace. At the end of the song I say, ‘Please stay around tonight, lay with me tonight.’ I like talking about the fact that you can do everything without doing everything. I say, ‘You think loving is touching.’ And it\'s all of the ideas of what love and loving somebody is. I feel most loved when my boyfriend runs me a bath and cooks dinner.” **“What Am I?”** “I wrote this when I was talking to my now boyfriend. He was in the UK and I had to be in America for eight weeks. It was when we just met and he wasn\'t being open. We decided that we were going to do the session in our Airbnb: I\'m lying on the sofa, I\'ve got my pajamas on and a cushion on my face. My producer Felix talks to me while I\'m having this breakdown and I\'m like, ‘I\'m so honest and open with my feelings that somebody who isn\'t, I don\'t know how to be in that situation.’ When I was writing it, I was thinking, ‘I wonder if you\'re thinking about me. I wonder if you\'re dreaming of me.’ It’s all just me asking, ‘Can you just tell me what I mean to you?’” **“Regular People”** “For a long time, I was trying to work out how to put this song together. In my head I wanted ten different artists to feature on it. It didn\'t turn out that way. It turned out being really difficult to sort out. I brought on Hamzaa, who I love. I\'ve got two completely different artists \[the other is American singer Lucky Daye\] from two different countries to try this.” **“Karma”** “This song must be inspired by all the music that I listened to growing up, really beautiful jazzy slow jams. People like Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday, and all the old records that my mum and dad played around the house. It\'s my best friend playing the saxophone. We grew up together, so it was really nice to have that connection. This track is me going, ‘I know I can\'t have you, but I\'m going to get you.’ It’s my cheeky moment on the album. I\'m not really that kind of girl, so writing this song I found fun.\" **“He’s Mine”** “This is me having my Brandy and Monica moment. I was worried about this song in the beginning because it feels like the most pop record on the album. One thing that I\'ve learned writing this album is not to be scared of the genre boundaries. I was wary that I\'m being pinned as an R&B artist and I\'m scared that if I put something else out everyone will go, ‘What you doing, you sellout.’ But as I was making the album, I realized that I could go in so many different directions.” **“What You Did”** “We wrote this song, then right at the last minute—on day of delivery—I got a text from Ella Mai on Friday evening asking, ‘Is your album submitted?’ She said, ‘Aww, I would\'ve loved to have been a part of it.’ When she said that to me, it was really interesting to me. I\'d never had somebody...never even thought of an artist messaging me to say they would\'ve loved to have been a part of my thing.” **“Do Not Disturb”** “I was trying to touch on the fact that I needed space to do my own thing. I was saying to someone, ‘I don\'t believe you. I don\'t believe that you are with me, and because of that, I need you to leave me alone.’ Music is how I cut all of my relationships. I\'ve had situations where we\'ve had an argument and I\'ve written the song, sent it to them, and not said anything else. I\'m bad at articulating what I want to say in an argument, so I write music. With this song, I wrote it and didn’t even send it to him, I just put it out. We haven’t spoken since.” **“Richie”** “A ‘wise fool’ means somebody who knows exactly what they\'re doing. A self-saboteur. \'Richie\' is actually about somebody really close to me and their addiction and gambling. I\'ve got a few friends, a couple of family members who have gambled, and I\'ve watched how much that can affect people. I\'ve just got so many friends who I\'ve watched have crazy highs and they\'ll have these crazy lows. So I guess Richie is a character. Almost all of the people that I know who have ever had real issues in gambling or any kind of addiction are the most intelligent.” **“Consistency”** “This is my favorite song on the album. It holds a whole different thing to everything else. It\'s about my mum. I was thinking about all the ways that I love and all the ways that I compromise. When I was a kid in Leicester, there used to be these underage club nights called Nappy Nights. It was a massive deal where all the girls got dressed up. It was our first time drinking Panda Pop \[British kids’ soda\] and dancing with boys. I finally pluck up the courage to ask my mum, ‘I want to go to this night.’ She said to me, ‘If you can go in the middle of all those people and dance around without looking at me, then you can go.’ Her point was that I had to be confident dancing on my own in a place full of unknown people before I could go out clubbing. It was a total compromise and got me to say, ‘I can do this.’” **“Square 1”** “You know when you go all the way around the houses with someone? Then you go all the way back and you\'re like, ‘How am I back here?’ That’s why I ended on this song. The album follows the story of a relationship and how it unfolds. I go through the motions and I end it angry but also like, ‘Cool. Let’s leave it then.’ It\'s a journey.”

slowthai knew the title of his album long before he wrote a single bar of it. He knew he wanted the record to speak candidly about his upbringing on the council estates of Northampton, and for it to advocate for community in a country increasingly mired in fear and insularity. Three years since the phrase first appeared in his breakout track ‘Jiggle’, Tyron Frampton presents his incendiary debut ‘Nothing Great About Britain’. Harnessing the experiences of his challenging upbringing, slowthai doesn’t dwell in self-pity. From the album’s title track he sets about systematically dismantling the stereotypes of British culture, bating the Royals and lampooning the jingoistic bluster that has ultimately led to Brexit and a surge in nationalism. “Tea, biscuits, the roads: everything we associate with being British isn’t British,” he cries today. “What’s so great about Britain? The fact we were an empire based off of raping and pillaging and killing, and taking other people’s culture and making it our own?” ‘Nothing Great About Britain’ serves up a succession of candid snapshots of modern day British life; drugs, disaffection, depression and the threat of violence all loom in slowthai’s visceral verses, but so too does hope, love and defiance. Standing alongside righteous anger and hard truths, it’s this willingness to appear vulnerable that makes slowthai such a compelling storyteller, and this debut a vital cultural document, testament to the healing power of music. As slowthai himself explains, “Music to me is the biggest connector of people. It don’t matter what social circle you’re from, it bonds people across divides. And that’s why I do music: to bridge the gap and bring people together.”

“We destroyed Wireless,” D-Block Europe’s Young Adz tells Apple Music’s Charlie Sloth. “They had to shut down our performance, bro. People getting pulled out of the crowd—big grown men, women, half dead, bro. Crazy.” The chart-scaling numbers put up by their debut mixtape, *Home Alone*, had already established the South Londoners as one of UK rap’s hottest tickets. The full-capacity chaos of their set at London’s Wireless Festival in July 2019 just confirmed it. D-Block Europe has no intention of resting on their laurels either, delivering a hefty 28 tracks on this tape released seven months after *Home Alone*. Considering its size, *PTSD* is remarkably absorbing and coherent, reshaping UK trap with sharp wordplay, indelible hooks, and plenty of sonic experimentation—the head-snapping rhythms of “Ain’t Chanelle,” the melodic melancholy of “Outside,” the searching self-examination of “Last Night in Barcelona.” “That’s why we withheld from even signing to a label in England, because this sound has never existed before over here in the way we’re doing it,” says Young Adz. “You can tell me the success you’ve had with this Afroswing artist or this club guy…that ain’t our music. We’re not a social experiment, like, ‘Let me just give them a bag and see if we can do it.’ *We’ve* got to do it, we’ve got to direct the wave.” As the collective’s core duo, Young Adz and Dirtbike LB are doing a fine job by themselves. High-wattage features from UK and US artists—including Dave, Lil Baby, AJ Tracey, and Krept & Konan—highlight their lofty status in hip-hop, while cutting *PTSD*’s trap-house tales and bedroom stories with bold glimpses of the paranoia and trauma of road life only makes the music more compelling. “We’re the ones that are pushing this boundary,” says Young Adz. “People who are signing urban music over here, whatever they want to call it…they call it urban, we call it pop in the streets. That ain’t street music. We’re doing street, UK, wavy music, front-lining it. And we’re doing more numbers than these people that are signed with a machine that’s spending £10,000 a week to keep them in the charts.”

Bridging distinct but closely connected music scenes can open new possibilities. On ‘No More Normal’, Swindle confidently grasps the different sides to the UK music scene. Boasting roots in the boundary-pushing world of Grime & Dubstep, this album marks the next step in the London-raised producer’s expanded vision for his music. It fuses different disciplines together in new and electrifying ways. He connects a group of peers sharing creative common ground, one that centres around the fertile space between UK Jazz, Grime and Hip Hop. The results span from lush, strings-laden soul to voicebox-heavy p-funk – often in the course of one song. “It’s a class photo of 2018,” he says. “I need everyone in this picture.” It incorporates an all-star cast of MC’s in Kojey Radical, Ghetts, D Double E and P Money, to instrumentalists Yussef Dayes, Nubya Garcia, Riot Jazz, and singers such as Etta Bond, Eva Lazarus, Daley and Kiko Bun. The album was built over a three year period. The opening track “‘What We Do’ became the track that set the scene for each studio session, a way of Swindle explaining what he was setting out to achieve. Featuring an (on paper) unusual combination of R&B singer Daley, Grime legends P Money & D Double E, and an opening speech from Bristol-based spoken word artist, Rider Shafique - “It describes the narrative of the record overall and helped set the agenda for what followed - I made a lot of tracks that were really good that at the end of the day didn’t fit this project”. The resulting work has a pervading sense of triumph against the odds, and a celebration of togetherness at this moment of fragmentation that manages to feel both optimistic and nostalgic. A record that could have only been made in today’s multicultural Britain. “No More Normal is the idea of us doing our thing, our way, with no rules or limitations. It is jazz influenced as much as it is grime influenced. It’s London influenced as much as it is LA influenced. I can work with D Double E and Nubya Garcia, these records are my imagination brought to life in musical form”. “No More Normal” follows a spate of projects where Swindle’s taken on the role of producer for other artists. That’s included Kojey Radical, for his single ‘Water’; Joel Culpepper, whose ‘Woman’ live session for Colors has clocked up 4M Youtube streams and counting, D Double E with three tracks on his debut album ‘Jackum’ and Mahalia’s EP ‘Seasons’. It follows years of graft spent staking roots in the underground, from early output on Butterz, to the Trilogy of Funk triple EP released last year. The debut singles "Reach The Stars" & "Coming Home" saw support from all the heavy hitters - Target, Jamz Supernova, Annie Mac, Julie Adenuga, and Gilles Peterson. An appreciation of jazz and funk has coursed through Swindle’s music since the very start. ‘No More Normal’ continues that love affair. Growing up in south London, he built his first studio in his bedroom when he was 14. Excluded from school for having “way too much energy” his early steps into music were aided by his blues guitarist father, who gave him lessons on the guitar and whose record collection – made up of soul and jazz touchstones - provided vital inspiration for his debut LP "Long Live The Jazz", released on Mala’s Deep Medi label in 2013. The follow up in 2015, “Peace, Love & Music”, was created in studio sessions all over the world, and, accompanied by an explosive live show, was further testament to the ambition and scope of this singular artist.