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”.
