You could easily read Steady As I Am, from John Glacier’s debut album, as a mission statement. “I’m sticking to the plan, not the game,” the British rapper offers. “Think I’m crazy, ’cause you’re all the same.” In a genre characterised by flash, Glacier cuts a unique figure, her USP a kind of wilful obfuscation. She doesn’t reveal her real name – the space where it should be on her Instagram bio is instead filled by the word “NO” – nor her age: she once told the Guardian she was “20,000” years old. She first attracted attention with a SoundCloud page, filled with snippets of music she had given shrugging, prosaic titles: A Child Was Sad So I Made This in Front of Her to Make Her Laugh; Sounds From Friday Evening. Said snippets have long been deleted, but a fragmentary, demo-like quality has clung to her releases ever since: the 12 short tracks on her 2022 mixtape Shiloh: Lost for Words played out in a mass of muffled synth tones and distorted samples.
More than one critic has compared the effect of her vocal style – occasional bursts of brisk lyricism separated by sections in which she incants the same phrases over and over, as if in a stoned daze – to overhearing someone’s scattered voice memos. On Like a Ribbon, even her most pugilistic lines – “I’m the hottest in the game”; “I don’t give a fuck, let the people talk”; “now they’re calling me a bitch – best believe it” – are delivered in an oddly blank tone, as if she’s muttering them to herself, unaware that anyone’s listening. Elsewhere, her lyrics have a stream-of consciousness effect, a splurge of words written to try to work out how she feels – or perhaps just because she likes the way they sound together: “Like a satellite in the dark / In the night / Whereabouts in the clouds like a kite / Floating in the winds let the birds float by,” runs a characteristic line on opener Satellites.
