Robert Davidson

While ‘Homerton B’ reimagined a genre’s sound, Blood Diamond has cemented an artist’s legitimacy; this is what UK drill has truly been threatening for years.

While Quaranta may feel unfairly dated by Brown’s more extreme release earlier this year, this is by far his most relatable and focused album yet. More than a version of hip-hop’s history, this is a version of Danny Brown’s life.

Primal, tense, and recursive, Space Heavy serves as another layer in the masterful and deeply unnerving project Marshall has embarked upon as King Krule. It’s an omnivorous sound that continues to eat up all the physical, mental and mythic space around us, growing more monstrous by the day.

Make no mistake, The Worm is a sea change, as much as Primary Colours was for The Horrors. An album borne out of a sincere soul-searching and one of the most well-executed concept albums of recent times.

If Return was waxwing ambition, then Less is Icarus’s fall. Not the sound and spectacle of TNT exploding, but the loneliness of waking from a deep sleep screaming. In its attempts to contain, Less is less sprawling, less capacious, less soaring – but more tense, more caustic, and more close to the bone.

Intense, disastrous, and confrontational, but also, tender, empathetic, and reflective, UGLY is a record routinely hijacked by its shadow.

Raven sits on its own plinth. Unassociated with any genre past, present or future, it simply exists like a grand Kubrick or Tarkovsky film, where any frame can be paused and in its stillness one can see the complexity of symmetry at play.

Deathcrash’s Return is an embarrassment of musical riches that is only matched by the depth of evocations that haunt the record, its power both life-affirming and oddly absent, like a photo of a happier time that’s starting to fade.

Water is simply awash with supreme moments of serene and scintillating musicality.

Donda doesn’t underwhelm, it overwhelms. It overwhelms like a new-born baby that has little concern for what you’ve experienced previously and what you have planned, forcing you to listen to its eternal screams.

At heart, there isn’t anything profoundly new for the band on G_d’s Pee AT STATE’S END, but truthfully, there’s still no other rush out there like it. For ardent Godspeed fans, it’s the perfect fix, and for the uninitiated, it’s as good a starting place as any.

It ... happens to be the first true testament to the real “Tottenham Sound”, one that we can update and christen the “N17 Sound”.