“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.
