For years, Mike Skinner has been living his best post-superstar life – DJ-ing regularly, raising small Streets. But nearly a decade on from his two 2011 albums, he returns with a banging outing he’s dryly downplayed as “an album of rap duets”.
Here are garage tunes freighted with everyman wisdom, drum’n’bass throwbacks where Skinner’s deadpan Barnet-via-Birmingham delivery meets a crush of on-point contributors, from Ms Banks to Idles. Exes and phone etiquette figure – by now, listeners will know how this wordsmith goes deepest when he seems most shallow. The titles alone are a marker of how well Skinner still dances on the philosopher-party animal cusp.
While the Streets’ Tame Impala two-hander justly set the internet abuzz, even better tunes lie within. I Wish You Loved You As Much As You Love Him puts its arm around the shoulder of a girl wasting her affections. Best of all, I Know Something You Did is an icy, soul-adjacent collaboration in which Skinner’s singing voice strains eloquently upwards: “I know something you did/ But I can’t say owt/ Because of, let’s say, how I found out.”
