Hide and Seek is an intriguing choice for the lead single off Stormzy’s upcoming record This Is What I Mean. For his debut album, the rapper picked Big For Your Boots as the first track out the gate — a song on which he made a thinly veiled threat to punt someone in the gob with his size-12 shoes — and for the follow-up, Heavy is the Head, it was Vossi Bop, in which he famously implored listeners to f*** both the government and Boris.
This latest release, though, has nothing of the sort, with fiery proclamations replaced by introspective musings on how to reignite the dying embers of a relationship. “Instead of us tearing it down, we’ll rearrange,” he suggests with an air of resignation in the first verse, his flow subdued over a plaintive beat. Then, in the second verse, he comes to terms with how “heartbreak is such a dark place, but we stay in it”.
In the wider context, though, it makes sense. This might be the first snippet we’ve heard of the upcoming album, but it comes just weeks after Mel Made Me Do It. It was a seven-minute voyage of lyrical excellence, elevated by a 10-minute video featuring some of the latest and greatest contributors to the black British cultural canon — from Dave and Little Simz to Jazzie B and Trevor Nelson — as well as cameos from the likes of Jose Mourinho and Louis Theroux.
Taken all together, it was an unignorable reminder of just how towering a presence Stormzy now is. And perhaps it allowed him to get all of that righteous bravado out of his system, because on Hide and Seek, he explores the same vulnerability that has led to some of the most moving moments off his last two albums.
The track is produced beautifully — gentle keys layered over a less-is-more palette of percussion — with some smartly curated contributions from rising Nigerian star Oxlade, as well as vocalists Ayanna and Teni.
It’ll sit in the middle of This Is What I Mean’s tracklist, and it’ll be interesting to see how it fits within the album’s architecture. Speaking of which — the album still has plenty to reveal about itself. We know that a bulk of the creative process took place on Osea Island — a remote patch of land in the Blackwater Estuary in Essex, owned by producer Nigel Frieda, and which has previously welcomed Rihanna and Charli XCX to record music — but so far, we don’t know who was there with him.
What Hide and Seek does suggest, however, is that Stormzy isn’t afraid to mix things up. A new era for the UK’s biggest rapper could be upon us.
