Heathens Jehst (Vinyl Record)

While UK hip-hop has long bowed down to his majesty, Jehst is now addressing ‘Heathens’ directly, four tracks of venerable penmanship and riposte that includes two recent drops that have kept fans in thrall of “the best British rapper of all time” (NME) and his ceaseless reserves of unequivocal syllables. “Still rock the Nuke Proof”, a chugging, deconstructed funk mosaic from Bastien Keb hangs ‘Heathens’ on the razor blade-sharp shrug of the shoulders. Riding the carousel revolutions as he endorses a “tailor-made rhyme style, wake-and-bake lifestyle”, Jehst ducks and weaves between the gaps of the track until he’s on the verge of making it a religious experience. Jaisu’s frothy jazz vapours for April’s ‘420 Every Day’ nudge along playful rhymes with mic remaining on red alert, before Pitch 92 teases a 10 below red rag on the lectern-trashing ‘State of the Union’. Subsequently a vein starts to pop on ‘Body Bag’, a dislocated, zero gravity freeze ray fired by Jetsun. As adept at making sure he’s “getting paid in full: Eric B & Rakim” as he is at taking orders for toe tags, Billy Brimstone’s psychedelic phlegm comes Michelin-starred: “You’re duck soup, I’m the pot-boiler / You’re ‘bout to see the end sooner than you want, like a plot spoiler”. Bio Long “at the forefront of UK hip-hop” (The Guardian) as “the UK’s most natural rhymer who simply doesn’t waste words” (Clash), Jehst’s career has spanned the pre-millennium ‘Premonitions’, his enduring YNR imprint that has housed the homegrown sovereignty Kashmere, Cappo, Micall Parknsun and Verb T, and his last album, 2017’s ‘Billy Green is Dead’, described as a "a qualified triumph" by The Wire magazine.