In just 18 months the Parisian MC has gone from delivering pizzas to playing for 65,000 people. He talks football, hanging out in Manchester with Paul Pogba and what he’s learned from the UK grime scene

MHD is in London with his team at the back door of the Village Underground in Shoreditch, waiting for his Subway to arrive. In spite of his unglamorous surroundings, the French MC – dressed in DSquared jeans, patent black trainers and with freshly bleached hair – looks more like an off-duty footballer than one of the music industry’s fastest rising rap stars.

Having amassed almost 500m views of just 13 videos on his YouTube channel, he’s come a long way from the pizza delivery job he had in Paris just 18 months ago. A couple of days before his debut concert in London he performed to more than 65,000 people in his father’s home country, Guinea, where he was greeted at the airport like a head of state by huge crowds of fans.

Inspired by the likes of French group Sexion d’Assaut, he started out making relatively mainstream hip-hop, but is now best known for pioneering the genre known as afro trap, which mixes the west African music he grew up with trap, a hard-edged subgenre of hip-hop that originated in Atlanta. He launched his career with Afro Trap Part 1 (La Moula), a track that uses the instrumental from Shekini by the Nigerian group P-Square. The video is shot in his housing estate in Paris’s 19th arrondissement and includes locals dancing in the street, clad in tracksuits, trainers and – not coincidentally – football shirts.

“Football is really important to me because everyone in my neighbourhood is passionate about it,” he says. “When we were hanging out and there was nothing to do we’d look for a ball and have a kickabout, and we’d go to the nearby stadium once a week to play a match. Now that I’m doing music I can’t help but bring some football into it.”

MHD’s love of football (and loyal support of Bordeaux) has been reciprocated. Adrien Rabiot, Serge Aurier, Alexandre Lacazette and Samuel Umtiti are among the French internationals who are fans of MHD; he is a friend of the Manchester United midfielder Paul Pogba; and his signature dance move – “le mouv” – has become a form of celebration in the Paris Saint-Germain locker room.

This synergy of football and rap has led him to the UK. For his track Afro Trap Part 8 (Never), MHD shot the video in Manchester. “Why Manchester? Well, there was already the connection with Paul Pogba. In part it was thanks to him that it happened – we speak quite frequently on the phone,” he explains. “We wore the United shirts and there were quite a few things that I liked about Manchester that I thought would work in the video – especially the red bricks, because that’s a reference to my neighbourhood where we have red bricks, too.”



MHD has also developed a taste for British grime. “I started to listen to it little by little, and we did some festivals where we saw British artists,” he says. “I saw Skepta, Section Boyz and Stormzy, and from there I started to check them out more. Then I came by Stormzy’s album, which I really liked. I like his flow.”

Like those artists, MHD draws much of his appeal from his rejection of the American template of rap in favouring his heritage, in this case French and African. “I was listening to French rappers who peppered their lyrics with English words because they were inspired by American rappers,” he says. “I did the opposite. I thought, ‘Wait a minute, I know Africa more.’ So I decided to use words from my own language, and that’s what led to my tracks like Ngatie Abedi or A Kele N’ta.”

A lot of slang in France is derived from north and west African languages, and he is aware that his lyrics appeal to a wide audience. “It makes them want to go and look it up straight away. They’re curious, they want to know what I’m saying.”

His popularity has rocketed over the last two years, largely due to his DIY approach to marketing, particularly on his YouTube channel and on social media – though he is quick to point out that it has not been easy. “It’s not like you just upload a video, great, done.”



Recently, touring has been relentless for MHD – he has done shows in Senegal, Morocco and France, and his summer schedule takes in Europe and Canada – though you would never know from the energetic performance he pulls off in London. Where does his discipline come from?

“It comes from my parents, and how I was brought up, but a big part of it also comes from myself. In my head I’ve calculated it all. I know what I want – and I know what I need to do to get it.”