“Are y’all ready for Freddie Gibbs?” asks a voice on stage, before the rapper appears above a luminous sea of phones. He hits the ground running, with a rapid-fire flow that starts an audience chant of “Freddie! Freddie!”
The 39-year-old from Gary, Indiana, put in the hard yards to get to medium-sized venues and the US Top 20 (with the album Alfredo in 2020), self-releasing mixtapes until finally getting signed. Nine albums in (some with collaborators such as Madlib and the Alchemist), the dishonourably discharged former US soldier (he was caught smoking marijuana) has a reputation for gruffly hard-hitting lyrics and gangsta rap stylings over imaginative beats. A charismatic performer – who resembles the late Tupac Shakur – he has tasted the “darker paths” he raps about, including a drive-by shooting from which he escaped unharmed. His gruff, breathless delivery is most startling when the music stops and his words hurtle undiluted from the stage.
