2024 is looking shiny for Slew, the 27-year-old model-turned-rapper who tied up this year in Burberry check-print.
The amiable Jack the Lad boasts pillowy lips and carved cheekbones, and is careful to withhold his birth name “because I want everything to lead to the music.” He has just over 7,000 followers on Instagram and nearly 3,000 on TikTok, decidedly humble in an age where interest is piqued by hundreds of thousands (if not millions).
And yet, Slew made an unlikely splash this November as he joined Rachel Weisz, Damon Albarn and Bukayo Saka et al in becoming faces of Burberry’s Spring 2024 campaign. The pictures are plastered across London, and will be rolled out across all regions on January 1.
“I got an email saying [Burberry creative director] Daniel Lee’s a fan of the music, he wants to get you involved,” Slew says, of his raps which pair catchy lyrics — “dream seller in Celine leather” — with electronic flourishes. His most popular single is 2021’s Sopranos (300,000 Spotify plays) while his debut mixtape Face Value was released in November and was accompanied by a sell out show at the Bermondsey Social Club. “After three years of constant hard work, I have finally started to see results,” he chirps.
Slew thanks Morell Maison, Burberry’s senior music manager, for the introduction with Britain's best known luxury brand. “He found one of my music videos on Grime Daily and was one of the first people to pay attention to me. I remember him saying ‘I’m going to get you a Burberry campaign, I’m going to do it,’” Slew recalls, but: “Riccardo Tisci wasn’t really biting.”
The narrative flipped when Tisci, Burberry's creative director 2018 – 2022, left his post and Yorkshire-born Lee was announced to take his place. “I remember when I went to the Burberry offices Daniel was playing some old rap — you can tell he cares about music,” he says. “I’ve met him a few times, he seems a lot more normal, approachable person than Riccardo Tisci.”
Slew’s years of experience modelling — which has included a number of months living in Japan for work — will have prepared him for the shoot; the results are all cropped dip-dyed hair and sultry stare, as he shows off a hunter-green leather gilet and checked tracksuit. But he doesn't want to talk about any of that. “In modelling you get people that think, ugh: ‘I’m good looking so I can do music. I can jump into anything, because I’m good looking,’” he says. “It doesn’t correlate. Now I am doing bits that are related to the music, and I’m grateful for that.”
Slew was born in West London (his parents are both from White City) and moved further and further out of town, before spending his teenage years in Hertfordshire. He currently lives there with his mother after a failed move-in with an ex-girlfriend (“which is brilliant”, he quips), and is solely focused on music after a stint as florist with his cousin. “We never stayed in the same place. I don’t want to say it was turbulent because I’m not trying to make it dramatic — but I’ve been to loads of different schools and things like that,” he says. If there were a silver lining, it is having alternate perspectives to enrich his tracks. “I’ve always been like, you guys [Londoners] are not cool — I’m on my own thing.”
Still, the city has been a magnet. “I’d always be in London for the raves. I’d come back [to Hertfordshire] just to go to sleep,” he says. “I started raving when I was 17, just drum and bass because that’s what my friends went to. Then I was like ‘alright, I’ll start going to my own things: grime, house, techno.”
He gets some “mad comments” on social media, but tries to respond to trolls with humour: “if you can make the person who’s trying to make a joke out of you look like an idiot, it makes for good content — just shove it back in their face.” And when it comes to politics, he is not hardline but happily attempts to summarise the landscape, saying “there’s a lot of f**ked up s**t going on. It’s quite a sad state of affairs everywhere, and I think England’s a bit of a joke as well. That’s my stance on it.”
Mostly he is concentrated on keeping his work unique, though. “I didn’t want to start rapping for the sake of it like some people do — just to copy other people. I wanted to do it with my own twist,” he says. Now he has Burberry under his belt, what does Slew see on the horizon? “I just want to go as far as I can. I don’t know what the limits are,” he says. “I’m hungry for it. I’m not going back to work in a job now. No way.”
