slowthai Isn’t Afraid Anymore
Simran Hans
Francesco Nazardo
Celestine Cooney
This week, FRONTPAGE sits down with slowthai, the iconoclastic British rapper whose previously comic antics take a much darker turn on his emotional new record..
slowthai has a ritual: Each day, the 28-year-old British rapper (real name Tyron Frampton) looks in the mirror and names five things he likes about himself.
‘It gets easier the more you do it,’ says Frampton with a sleepy grin.
Today, days before the release of his third studio album, UGLY, five things Frampton likes about himself are: his eyes, his smile, the gaps in his teeth, his goofiness, and how easily he gets excited.
He’s particularly excited because tonight he’s playing a rock show in a pub.
Swaddled in a plush gray dressing gown and still a little dozy at noon, Frampton lights a cigarette on his front porch and flips his phone camera around to show me his view: a paved driveway looking onto an immaculate suburban street.
It’s not quite the environs that the rabble-rousing MC grew up in.
In 2019, slowthai made headlines with his incendiary debut, Nothing Great About Britain, a funny and furious rebuke to the political establishment, which won him a Mercury Prize nomination.
A kind of punk prophet (or maybe just a punk), he got a reputation for performing shirtless onstage, sweating enthusiastically, making people laugh, and saying various things that could get him in trouble.
In 2020, a drunken verbal slip at the NME Awards saw him canceled; he still somehow managed a number one album the following year.
Top and briefs SUNSPEL Jeans TOMMY HILFIGER Necklace HOMER Belt STYLIST’S OWN Boots UGG
Highsnobiety / Francesco Nazardo
The title of his third album, UGLY, is an acronym for “U Gotta Love Yourself.” According to Frampton ‘it’s a mantra to myself’ — and one that became pressing when he found himself in a dark place as he began to put the record together.
‘I just felt more depressed than I’d ever felt.
I didn’t care about anything,’ he says.
On the road touring his critically acclaimed sophomore album, TYRON, in 2021, he wasn’t eating properly.
He couldn’t get out of bed.
‘You gotta think, ‘Why do I not wanna wake up?’ There’s so many beautiful things around me, and I can’t see anything because I’m so jaded with how unhappy I am within myself, and how I’m not living up to the expectations I’ve placed on myself.’
‘One drink’s never enough / Excuse me while I self-destruct / ’cause I don’t give a fuck,’ he raps over a swirling, paranoid beat on ‘Yum,’ UGLY’s opening track.
The album sees Frampton journeying through the mud of self-loathing and the fires of rage to a promised land of something resembling peace.
Frampton says if the album was a movie, it’d look like Wes Anderson’s melancholy comedy drama The Royal Tenenbaums: ‘Colorful but dark, the opposite of what it is.’ Tracks such as the jangly “Sooner” and the punk-rock-inspired.
