“I’ve been lacking motivation, I need an innervention,” gasps slowthai in the opening bars of his third album, UGLY. It is, perhaps, an acknowledgement of his disappointing second album, Tyron (2021). Released in the wake of his bad behaviour at the 2020 NME awards (where he made sexually inappropriate comments to host Katherine Ryan), that record had handed off all his most personal lyrics to guest artists. But UGLY finds the Northampton-born rapper back on intense, energetic form, taking a series of rapid breaths before plunging back into the chaotic energy of his soul. An “innervention”, he told Rolling Stone, is a self-reckoning. “You look inward,” he explained, “and you go, ‘Check yourself, man.’ Then you’re like, ‘OK, I went into autopilot, and I had to pull myself back into my body in some way but I’m awake now.”
On UGLY, he uses rock music as an alarm bell to jolt himself back to reality. A fan of Nirvana and Radiohead growing up, slowthai went to Dan Carey (Fontaines DC, Wet Leg) for production with a ragged, rattling edge. It’s churning with murky guitars, which add powerful ballast to his skittery, contradictory lyrics. Their grit also gives emotional traction to some of his clichés.
UGLY begins with the jittery, industrial “YUM” on which slowthai describes unpacking his “loose screws” and “lost composure” to a therapist. His breathing is shallow; there are screams and lift-shaft roars in the background as he rails about self-destruction. The therapist speaks for all of us when he advises: “I need you to breathe.” But there’s an uptick in the sonic thrill when the rapper refuses, barrelling on towards a grimy, urban oblivion of cheap sex and drugs. It’s the sound of a man running down a urine-stained concrete stairwell.
But there’s a jaunty lift in mood with “Sooner” on which the joys of “having no f*** to give” are celebrated with handclaps and a little funk-snap in the guitar. “I’m riding shotgun in a 306/ Eat your Weetabix/ Feeling love drunk,” sings “happy boy” slowthai. Then comes the bop along “Feel Good”, whose title seems to nod to “Feel Good Inc” by Gorillaz. The rapper recently collaborated with the cartoon band and described Damon Albarn as his “older spirit animal”. It’s a giddy track with reckless echoes of Underworld’s “Born Slippy” in its headbanger repetitions: “I feel so good/ I feel so good.”
“F*** It Puppet” is apparently the name slowthai’s therapist gave to the self-destructive devil on his shoulder. Here, it reveals the deeply troubling nature of “the voices [that] make me act impulsively”. Against an unsettling backdrop of jangling chords and a loping, lupine prowl of a beat, slowthai’s inner conflicts are dramatised as his demons suggest violence and his angels remind him: “At least mum loves me.”
“Happy” comes skirling in on a great grungey wave of guitars with a stadium-sized melody while “UGLY” (feat Fontaines DC) is a head-in-hands yowl at the “TV screens/ Adverts” that make humans feel inadequate and the artist’s envy of “grown men/ crying like infants”. It’s a gut-scrunching, foetal position response to the days when “loving is brittle plastic” and “your boss won’t f*** off and you’re on the brink”.
The album ends with the lovely lullaby of “25%”, which is about the idea that none of us are ever 100 per cent ourselves and that the missing quarter needs love. I suspect slowthai will get all that love back from fans now. UGLY is a powerful and direct transmission from a brilliant, beleaguered brain.
