South London rapper Dave has been hailed as a prodigious talent since he started rapping in his mid-teens: lyrically inventive, wise beyond his years, politically insightful and emotionally intense without being uncomfortably earnest. The past three years have seen him grow from underground street-freestyling sensation to truly versatile artist. Psychodrama is his debut long-player, following a series of singles and EPs that showed him equally adept at ripping through frantic grime singles, pained memoirs, blissed-out summer anthems and seven-minute-plus reflections on the failings of the political class.
Framed loosely around the idea that the 20-year-old is in therapy for everything he’s been through, Pyschodrama’s 11 tracks flip from the mellow and intricate Afrobeats love song Location, with Nigerian superstar Burna Boy, to recent single Black, a powerful reflection on the black British experience – spanning African diasporic pride and the weight of post-colonial pain and racism. There’s a lot of piano (Dave is grade 7), a lot of weariness about the “battle scars” of growing up in Streatham with two brothers in jail, and a lot of wariness about success, trust and betrayal.
It all culminates in Lesley, a staggering, 11-minute exploration of toxic masculinity and domestic abuse. “Tell a yout’, if you got a brain then use it,” he raps, early on; Dave’s doing that, but has much more in his armoury than just brains.
