In 2018, a dance music website ran a profile of producer M1onTheBeat. This was at the height of UK drill’s notoriety, and though he had already made a name for himself as one of the rap subgenre’s chief architects, the feature painted a compelling portrait of a career on the musical margins. He had honed his craft with frequent collaborator MKThePlug while both were resident in a YMCA hostel. His studio was a laptop and a pair of battered speakers in a bedroom in a Tottenham flat with chunks of plaster missing from the walls. (According to the profile, the neighbours, believing he was running a drug den, had alerted the authorities, who allegedly responded to the complaints – oddly – by forcing him to tear down the soundproofing in the room, hence the damage.) Three drill tracks he had co-produced had been removed from YouTube. Under the circumstances, it was hard to see UK drill ever shifting from folk devil to mainstream success, and you couldn’t imagine M1onTheBeat moving out of his pockmarked bedroom studio in the foreseeable future.
