Skepta, Ignorance is Bliss review: The grime star has turned yet another corner

Junior Adenuga is always at his best as an everyman underdog, and with his fifth album, he might just have invented a new genre

(Boy Better Know)

Considering he’s a 36-year-old proud dad, it’s about right that Junior Adenuga should explore a newly mature outlook on his fifth album proper.

He’s had a topsy-turvy career up to this point, first emerging as a teenage star in grime’s golden age some 15 years ago, making his name as a fearsome battle MC, before signing to a major to release a string of eager-to-please mid-Atlantic urban pop records that he’s now pretty much disowned (including, notoriously, All Over the House which came accompanied by a porn video). After a mid-career breakdown, he re-emerged phoenix-like with “That’s Not Me” in 2016, his triumphant, self-produced return to grime that was followed by his defiantly British fourth album, the Mercury prize-winning Konnichiwa. The first grime record since Boy in Da Corner to take the prize, Konnichiwa, alongside the rise of Stormzy, definitively set grime’s place as a serious genre, capable of offering new ideas more than a decade after its birth.

Now, on Ignorance Is Bliss, Skepta (or Chief SK as he refers to himself throughout – he was recently made a chief of his family’s ancestral village in Nigeria) has turned another corner, quite possibly inventing a new sub-genre as he does. It’s the first – and likely not the last – album of (bear with me here) grown grime.

Opener “Bullet From A Gun” sets out his stall. Over warping synths that nod to the digital melancholy of Detroit techno, Skepta – always at his best as an everyman underdog – explores heartbreak and identity, collapsing time with lyrics that tell how “I saw my granddad’s name on the gravestone, the same as mine/ Already dead, nothing to fear, I been here from time.” Last year, he became a father, and he concludes that “there’s no better feeling than going home and seeing my little girl in the cot”. It’s a startlingly introspective first track, and probably the best solo tune Skepta has recorded since the Mercury-snatching triumphs of 2016.

Elsewhere, the album is strengthened by Skepta’s sheer bloody mindedness. Rather than draw on a glut of big name US features – and considering the gazillion views he’s racked up with last year’s A$AP Rocky collaboration “Praise Da Lord”, he probably wasn’t short on offers – guest spots are largely kept to a trusted clique: J Hus drips his effortless flow all over the stately RnB highpoint “What Do You Mean”; Boy Better Know roll in for the crew cut “Gangsta” (JME steals the show with bars calling out slumming rich kids “even trying to chat like man/ I hate when I hear Brits misuse slang”); and 2 Step originator B-Live brings an Ayia Napa oggy oggy oggy flow to the UKG update “Love Me”. Nigerian superstar and regular collaborator Wizkid is present (albeit buried deep in the mix) on one of the album’s few upbeat moments, “Glow in the Dark”, and there’s a satisfaction to be had from Skepta’s wry observations; “The street’s at an all-time high/ the government at an all-time low/ politicians trying to get tickets to the shows...”

In keeping with the relatively restrained guest spots, it’s heartening just how much Skepta has rejected overloading Ignorance is Bliss with high-profile producers, preferring instead to burrow into his own aesthetic. There’s no attempt to chase someone else’s wave here; no token drill, afroswing or trap beats to satisfy playlist algorithms. Instead, his cold grime sonics are rendered down to their no-frills essentials – brutalist blocks of sad angular melodies and hard, spacious drums.

The result is a quintessentially London record, as dark and moody as it is brash and innovative. “We used to do young and stupid,” Skepta concludes on “Gangsta”. “Now we do grown.”