While Dizzee Rascal was busy infiltrating the mainstream with chart-friendly fusions, grime came back. Raskit – his sixth album – is the veteran MC’s back-to-basics response, some of it predictable but much of it riveting. “I was on the mic when you were in playschool,” he sneers on Ghost. A few tracks hark back to the genre’s early days, but Make It Last has little nostalgia for the shootings and back-stabbings. Tracks like Everything Must Go are very much in the present; Dizzee is scathing on the gentrification of London. Standout track Space, meanwhile, provides a masterful collision of echoey production and dense, rhythmic wordplay.
