In 2018, a dance music website ran a profile of producer M1onTheBeat. This was at the height of UK drill’s notoriety, and though he had already made a name for himself as one of the rap subgenre’s chief architects, the feature painted a compelling portrait of a career on the musical margins. He had honed his craft with frequent collaborator MKThePlug while both were resident in a YMCA hostel. His studio was a laptop and a pair of battered speakers in a bedroom in a Tottenham flat with chunks of plaster missing from the walls. (According to the profile, the neighbours, believing he was running a drug den, had alerted the authorities, who allegedly responded to the complaints – oddly – by forcing him to tear down the soundproofing in the room, hence the damage.) Three drill tracks he had co-produced had been removed from YouTube. Under the circumstances, it was hard to see UK drill ever shifting from folk devil to mainstream success, and you couldn’t imagine M1onTheBeat moving out of his pockmarked bedroom studio in the foreseeable future.
Five years on, however, everything has changed. M1onTheBeat’s first mixtape opens with an answering machine message: “I’m busy grafting making this happen,” he says. “History wasn’t made by those sitting there doing nothing.” The “this” is presumably the unexpected commercial rise of UK drill. It is now a genre that spawns chart-topping singles and albums, and it isn’t too self-aggrandising of the producer to suggest he has had an important role in it. He has produced hits for Digga D and K-Trap, both of whom appear on his mixtape. Loski’s 2018 album, Call Me Loose – another record with M1onTheBeat’s fingerprints on it – was named by Drake as an influence on his album Scorpion; putting his money where his mouth was, the Canadian superstar subsequently turned up on a freestyle with Headie One, with M1onTheBeat providing production.
M1onTheBeat’s first mixtape tells you something about UK drill’s inexorable spread outwards from London. The Yorkshire-accented vowels of Huddersfield rapper Booter Bee and the creepy, husky Brummie voice of M1llionz are as striking in their own way as, say, SL’s slyly understated conversational delivery. You get a lot of M1onthebeat’s sparse signature style: music that, regardless of the circumstances in which it’s now created, still feels like it’s emanating from a shabby, smoke-filled bedroom in the small hours of the morning. Synths that drift like mist or slippery threads of electronics weaving around each other; piercing, grime-derived Roland 808 beats and sub-bass that roots the sound in a distinctly British musical lineage that stretches back to jungle.
It’s the kind of thing which has been subject to mimicry, provoking a rash of YouTube videos explaining how to make “M1onTheBeat-style” tracks; last year, he took to social media to protest about other producers releasing note-for-note copies of his beats. Listening to opener Tsunami x 2 or the Booter Bee feature Royal Navy, which transforms an old-fashioned euphoria-inducing rave synth sound into a ghostly slither, you understand why others might be eager to clamber aboard. There is something hugely affecting about his sound’s eeriness; it doesn’t feel menacing so much as desolate. There’s a lot of space in it for rappers to do their thing but, emotionally at least, it frequently feels like it’s undercutting their threats and boasts about acts of violence, shrouding them in a mood of bleak desperation.
More striking still are the tracks that shift from the producer’s blueprint. He has an intriguing way of taking standard pop tropes and subtly warping them until he has imprinted a distinct identity on them. The AutoTuned vocals on Top Form are processed so they sound as though they’re emanating from underwater. The pretty acoustic guitar figure that backs Cristale’s guest appearance on Sing Dat fades in and out at unexpected intervals, as if it’s playing over an unstable connection. The R&B vocal samples on AM to PM are located somewhere in the far distance: part of the musical scenery rather than its point.
Most striking of all is the closing track, Hear No Evil, See No Evil, partly because Kojey Radical and Knucks’s lyrics shift away from the preoccupations of drill, partly because of the addictive chorus courtesy of vocalist Miraa May and the weirdly MOR electric piano that runs through it. It would sound like a hit single were the second half not consumed with more answerphone messages, this time congratulating M1onTheBeat for his achievements. These are a little surplus to requirements but still, The Mixtape deserves praise: M1onTheBeat is drawing pop music into his world, rather than vice versa.
This week Alexis listened to
Tirzah – Their Love
Tirzah’s album has been lurking around my stereo for weeks thanks to intriguing stuff like Their Love, a beautiful piano ballad recorded so it sounds like it’s emanating from the bottom of a well.
In 2018, a dance music website ran a profile of producer M1onTheBeat. This was at the height of UK drill’s notoriety, and though he had already made a name for himself as one of the rap subgenre’s chief architects, the feature painted a compelling portrait of a career on the musical margins. He had honed his craft with frequent collaborator MKThePlug while both were resident in a YMCA hostel. His studio was a laptop and a pair of battered speakers in a bedroom in a Tottenham flat with chunks of plaster missing from the walls. (According to the profile, the neighbours, believing he was running a drug den, had alerted the authorities, who allegedly responded to the complaints – oddly – by forcing him to tear down the soundproofing in the room, hence the damage.) Three drill tracks he had co-produced had been removed from YouTube. Under the circumstances, it was hard to see UK drill ever shifting from folk devil to mainstream success, and you couldn’t imagine M1onTheBeat moving out of his pockmarked bedroom studio in the foreseeable future.
Five years on, however, everything has changed. M1onTheBeat’s first mixtape opens with an answering machine message: “I’m busy grafting making this happen,” he says. “History wasn’t made by those sitting there doing nothing.” The “this” is presumably the unexpected commercial rise of UK drill. It is now a genre that spawns chart-topping singles and albums, and it isn’t too self-aggrandising of the producer to suggest he has had an important role in it. He has produced hits for Digga D and K-Trap, both of whom appear on his mixtape. Loski’s 2018 album, Call Me Loose – another record with M1onTheBeat’s fingerprints on it – was named by Drake as an influence on his album Scorpion; putting his money where his mouth was, the Canadian superstar subsequently turned up on a freestyle with Headie One, with M1onTheBeat providing production.
M1onTheBeat’s first mixtape tells you something about UK drill’s inexorable spread outwards from London. The Yorkshire-accented vowels of Huddersfield rapper Booter Bee and the creepy, husky Brummie voice of M1llionz are as striking in their own way as, say, SL’s slyly understated conversational delivery. You get a lot of M1onthebeat’s sparse signature style: music that, regardless of the circumstances in which it’s now created, still feels like it’s emanating from a shabby, smoke-filled bedroom in the small hours of the morning. Synths that drift like mist or slippery threads of electronics weaving around each other; piercing, grime-derived Roland 808 beats and sub-bass that roots the sound in a distinctly British musical lineage that stretches back to jungle.
It’s the kind of thing which has been subject to mimicry, provoking a rash of YouTube videos explaining how to make “M1onTheBeat-style” tracks; last year, he took to social media to protest about other producers releasing note-for-note copies of his beats. Listening to opener Tsunami x 2 or the Booter Bee feature Royal Navy, which transforms an old-fashioned euphoria-inducing rave synth sound into a ghostly slither, you understand why others might be eager to clamber aboard. There is something hugely affecting about his sound’s eeriness; it doesn’t feel menacing so much as desolate. There’s a lot of space in it for rappers to do their thing but, emotionally at least, it frequently feels like it’s undercutting their threats and boasts about acts of violence, shrouding them in a mood of bleak desperation.
More striking still are the tracks that shift from the producer’s blueprint. He has an intriguing way of taking standard pop tropes and subtly warping them until he has imprinted a distinct identity on them. The AutoTuned vocals on Top Form are processed so they sound as though they’re emanating from underwater. The pretty acoustic guitar figure that backs Cristale’s guest appearance on Sing Dat fades in and out at unexpected intervals, as if it’s playing over an unstable connection. The R&B vocal samples on AM to PM are located somewhere in the far distance: part of the musical scenery rather than its point.
Most striking of all is the closing track, Hear No Evil, See No Evil, partly because Kojey Radical and Knucks’s lyrics shift away from the preoccupations of drill, partly because of the addictive chorus courtesy of vocalist Miraa May and the weirdly MOR electric piano that runs through it. It would sound like a hit single were the second half not consumed with more answerphone messages, this time congratulating M1onTheBeat for his achievements. These are a little surplus to requirements but still, The Mixtape deserves praise: M1onTheBeat is drawing pop music into his world, rather than vice versa.
This week Alexis listened to
Tirzah – Their Love
Tirzah’s album has been lurking around my stereo for weeks thanks to intriguing stuff like Their Love, a beautiful piano ballad recorded so it sounds like it’s emanating from the bottom of a well.