Slowthai turns in a particularly bug-eyed performance on Up All Week, a track that references Faithless’s 1995 pop-trance anthem Insomnia. Mura Masa has always displayed an impressive ability to round up big names for his albums’ supporting cast lists – Wolf Alice’s Ellie Roswell, A$AP Rocky, Damon Albarn and Charli XCX among them – and the same is true here. Mura Masa’s video for Blessing Me with Pa Salieu and Skillibeng.

To the kind of toothsome melodies that prevailed on those tracks, it adds deliberately cluttered beats, a frenetic array of found sounds – video game synths, please-replace-the-handset-and-try-again beeps, children giggling, mobile phone ringtones and text message alerts – and a plethora of guest vocalists. It’s not just an album that features a song called Prada (I Like It), it’s an album on which a song called Prada (I Like It) ranks among its more profound statements, where even a solitary throwback to the melancholy style of its predecessor – 2gether, which carries something of Radiohead circa The Bends in its DNA – finds itself unexpectedly disrupted by an incongruous grinding synth drop.Ģgether aside, Demon Time’s primary musical influence is obviously UK garage, or more specifically the ultra-poppy strain of UK garage that hit big in the early 00s charts: the Sunship mix of Mis-Teeq’s All I Want, Liberty X’s Artful Dodger-produced Thinking It Over, Shanks & Bigfoot’s Sweet Like Chocolate. His third was to try the stuff that comprises Demon Time, which couldn’t be less ponderous or introspective if it tried. His second thought was apparently to give up music entirely and become a potter. His initial thought during Covid was to follow RYC with “a bunch of ponderous and introspective music”.

It’s a shift mirrored in the saga of the third album by Mura Masa, as 26-year-old Guernsey-born producer Alex Crossan prefers to be known, who rose to fame five years ago when tropical house was in vogue, before going off-piste with his guitar-heavy second album RYC.

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