J Hus must be feeling seasick from all the ups and downs of his career. In 2015, as the Stratford musician born Momodou Jallow was starting out, he spent time in Feltham Prison and was stabbed five times afterwards. By 2017, his fantastic debut album Common Sense was playing a major part in expanding UK rap’s horizons to include African and Caribbean sounds, earning gold sales figures and Brit and Mercury nominations.
But in 2018 he was back in jail for knife possession, and by mid-2019 he was on top again, sharing the O2 stage with Drake, performing at Wireless festival and appearing on Skepta and Ed Sheeran albums.
On his hastily announced second album, it sounds like he’s finally calming down. “How you gonna run the world, you can’t even run your life?” he asks himself on the tense, murky Fight for Your Right.
Musically, with production largely by his regular collaborator JAE5, he hops genres with even more confidence than before, from the melodic dancehall of Repeat, sung by new Jamaican star Koffee, to the spy theme bass of Helicopter and the mariachi horns and jittery strings of No Denying.
If only it wasn’t January it would be the sound of the summer.
