“As much as I would love to break America, I don’t want to have to feel like I’m compromising anything to break a new market,” Songer says. “If that happens, it happens. If not, I’m not gonna die swimming against the tide.”
As he says this, the rapper sits at a table on the banks of the Grand Union canal, outside Paddington Station in north central London. He doesn’t live here, but it’s easy to get to on the train from his home near Reading, a broadly unremarkable town outside the British capital. He takes a sip of beer. Suddenly he seems to remember that he’s speaking to a fairly well known American music magazine.
“I’ve always wanted to break America,” he says. “It’s the absolute dream.”
For now, it’s impressive enough that Songer has broken in the U.K. Wokingham, the small town he grew up in (just outside Reading, which is just outside London) is not known to be overflowing with rap talent. He blew up in 2017, aged 17, when a freestyle on the British YouTube channel Bl@ckbox went viral. His name became better known on home shores when “Vino Bandit,” a collaboration with the drum and bass producer K Motionz, crashed the U.K. singles chart. Then his own track “Toxic Freestyle,” featuring an instrumental lifted from the Britney classic, became the second-highest selling U.K. rap single of 2024. For all of the U.K. rap scene’s talent, for all its brawn and bravado, its innovation in production and depiction of the country’s troubled streets, few rappers convey the turmoil inside their own heads quite like Songer.
But despite interest from the mainstream, Songer remains resolutely independent. His choice of lyrical subject matter makes him something of an outlier too, his albums full of confessional bars about mental health and the challenges of growing up in the spotlight. “I’m not a rapper, not an MC, not a producer, not a singer, just someone who writes down stuff and puts it out to the world,” Songer says. I’ve interviewed him several times, and this is the sort of thing he says often.
Our most recent interview happens a week before the release of his sixth album, What If I Say No?, out this Friday. Having toured Australia, New Zealand and much of Europe, supported grime pioneer Dizzee Rascal, played Glastonbury and made music with a broad range of scene legends, you might think the American market would be the next target on his hit list. But for now he has his mind on the impact of another English export on the United States. And don’t call it soccer.
“Football lyrics that are shit are so annoying,” Songer raps on new album highlight “What’s the Punchline.” “If you’re on the wing like Bale or Beckham, I’m throwing coins.” Even you, American reader, know who David Beckham is, and maybe even that, in his playing days, he played on the right side of the field, or the right wing. You may even have heard of Gareth Bale. Being “on the wing” (also like doing time on a prison wing) like “insert footballer here,” is a common lyric among British rappers. Throwing coins at the pitch is something unruly football fans — in the sport’s largely bygone lawless era — would do if they were unimpressed with a player’s performance, particularly affecting wingers, as they were closest to the side of the pitch. You get it. It’s a clever bar.
“Don’t just watch the games,” Songer says, addressing anyone who’s yet to fall in love with the sport. “Watch the fan culture. Watch what it does to people. Watch the way people react to it and what it means to the people watching it. That’s how you fall in love with football. People live and breathe it. It dictates a weekend.”
It could be about to dictate his weekend. We speak on the day before England’s tragic semi-final defeat to Lionel Messi’s Argentina. “If we win against Argentina tomorrow,” he says, still naively unaware of his country’s impending immolation, “then I’m flying out there for the final.” He has a ticket already, which cost in the region of £5,000. He thinks if he’d waited until the semi-final was over, that price would have almost doubled.
Like football, British rappers have a checkered past when it comes to making it big in the United States. You may have heard of MIA, or Skepta, The Streets, or even Dizzee Rascal (and you’re welcome for Slick Rick, MF DOOM and 21 Savage), but further legends of the U.K. rap landscape like Wiley, Giggs, Ms Dynamite, D Double E, Casisdead, Skinnyman, So Solid Crew and 67 are probably less likely to ring bells in your ears. How would Songer suggest a new listener might get into his music?
“Rather than the songs that I think commercially might do better, I’d show them one of the more honest ones,” he says. “I rely on honesty so much. Without the honesty I’m just someone that rhymes quickly.” He mentions one of his favorite lyrical subject matters. “It’s not just a case of this geezer likes to go out and get hammered. It’s why do I get hammered? How do I feel after, and the complexities that come with that.”
These are the two sides of his musical personality. Among his Spotify most played, you’ll find songs like “Vino Bandit” and “Balling,” where Songer raps over raucous beats about going out on a Friday, drinking lager and maybe the occasional narcotic. Elsewhere in his oeuvre you’ll find stuff like “No More Candles” (2019), a laconic cloud-rap track over which he intones lines such as: “I have been blessed in life to the point where I don’t complain, but oh my days, why the fuck am I feeling so much pain?” Then there are others like the grime riddim “Mind of War,” and the U.K. drill-inflected “Better than Yours,” with a Kelis-inspired hook (“My album brings all the boys to the yard/Damn right, that’s better than yours … I could teach you, but you ain’t got bars”).
Harvey Ryan*
Then again he also does like, as he says, getting hammered. “Stop giving me politics, I don’t want politics, I want Moretti at half-past three,” he raps on “Feel My Face.” Then: “Asking the barman to give me a free one, somebody told me that talk is cheap/Whole generation trying to escape on C-O-C-A-I-N-E.”
The two sides of Songer’s modus operandi — neatly dichotomised in the title of another new track, “Vices vs Verses” — can be traced back to his beginnings, growing up in pubs around Wokingham. His grandad was the singer and frontman in a pub band called Alfie & the Alcoholics.
“Hence my middle name,” says Songer, real name James Alfred Songer. “My middle name is Alfred because of my grandad. There was banjos, the craziest looking guitars. It wasn’t like, ‘let’s get a Les Paul.’ It would be: ‘Let’s get a banjo with three strings missing.’” He credits his kin for his musical passion: “It’s in the family, people that love music. My dad adores music from my grandad, and I adore music from my dad. So yeah without those 12 pints and a banjo, I’m not sure what would happen.” Was he drinking 12 pints as a child? “Not at that age, no. I think I was only on about 10 or 11 at that time.”
As well as his grandad’s Bob Dylan and Johnny Cash covers, Songer grew up listening to the Arctic Monkeys and Eminem. He once saw J. Cole supporting the early 2010s U.K. rap superstar Tinie Tempah. At school he and his friends learned to rap by cussing each other’s mums. Songer soon realized he had a gift for rhyming insults, writing lists of punchlines in his notes and rattling them off at any opportunity. Eventually his friends persuaded him he was actually pretty good. As he reached adolescence, he had mates who were throwing drum and bass raves around Wokingham, Reading and Bristol. Songer became their go-to MC, belting out those same punchlines to sweaty clubs full of teenagers at 160 beats per minute.
In 2017, aged 17, he recorded his near-legendary Bl@ckbox freestyle and the British music industry started to take notice. His debut album Dream Workz, with an image of Songer smoking on the moon as its cover, came in 2019. Then came Lyrics for Sanity and The Sunrise Project, on which Songer reached new levels of poetic introspection. “I’m paranoid, my phone’s got my life on it/Credit card, fingerprint, it’s got facial recognition, notepage, that’s my mind on it/I wish that I didn’t, but rely on it/Knowledge is power, I think I’ll die from it,” he lamented on “Confession Tape 17.”
His next album, SKALA, named after his family dog, featured a guest verse from grime legend D Double E, a key cosign and mentor who still texts Songer well wishes on Christmas morning. Fifth album The Price of Therapy cast Songer’s as U.K. rap’s top psychiatrist, dropping lines like: “My lyric book will know me by my scary side/I used to write to cope, now I get a flight/There’s airport security I recognise.”
The first time I interviewed Songer, nearly five years ago, he told me “I’m into politics, but I hate politicians.” On “Front Row Seats,” another highlight from the new album, Songer pines: “Child poverty’s the highest that it’s ever fucking been/Where’s the party for that gone, what kind of world to we live in?”
“I think it’s harder to be optimistic about the future than ever before,” he says. “I think the light at the end of the tunnel has gone out. I think the illusion that technology getting better is gonna somehow save the world is gone. The disbalance of power, the elites, the world’s first trillionaire… It’s gonna get really dystopian. My worry is, do we have enough time for the pendulum to swing back the other way? I probably sound a bit miserable, but I’m not optimistic at all.”
DAYS AFTER OUR conversation the World Cup was presented to the Spanish captain Rodri by the President. Songer skipped it in the end, opting to sell his ticket after England’s semi-final defeat and watch at home like the rest of us. He is perhaps more familiar with the sight of the tangerine tyrant handing over a trophy than most, having seen his club team Chelsea handed the psychopathically designed Club World Cup by the same man last summer. “I think he’s an absolute scumbag,” Songer says. “And I think the sooner FIFA have a president that isn’t two and a half inches inside of Donald Trump, the better.”
He stops short of total doomsday speak, especially on the subject of football. “I only ever see the World Cup as a good thing,” he says. “It is only ever a force for good, even if people are trying to drag it the other way. The world’s on its arse really. I just think we’re in real danger of handing the keys, if we haven’t already, to people that can dictate the narrative of the world to be whatever they want.” He invokes another recent news story. “You know the two people that climbed the Empire State Building and got married? One: How amazing is that? But two: Their flag said ‘The day that the power of love overtakes the love of power, the world will find peace.’” Sounds like a Songer bar. “Yeah, exactly. They must have access to my demos or something.”
Halfway through our conversation, a twentysomething man walks past us and stops. “Songer!” The rapper smiles and gladly poses for a photo with the fan, asks his name and thanks him for his support. He tells me this is normal for him by now. In the same vein, he says breaking America would not mean “being top of Billboard charts,” but “expanding my audience and building a community, building a family. If I were to break America whilst maintaining the level of integrity that’s so important to me within my lyrics, then it would be the biggest possible compliment to the music. If they can relate to how I’m feeling, then we’re all in this together.”
