London becomes Essex in Buckhurst Hill, where back gardens stretch like cats and engines become distinct rather than blurred together. Classical music is piped across its polite little tube station. In an upmarket Italian chain restaurant, ladies are lunching, as is grime MC Kano, 10 miles and half a life away from the East Ham of his youth.

Kano has the charmed existence of the slightly famous. His success has him set up with his partner in a nice suburb, but not mobbed in Tesco. “People think I can’t go shopping – that’s their perception of how famous I am,” he says, bemused. “I was around my old streets, and I see one guy I went to school with – he was in a work van. He stopped and was like: ‘Yo, you’re back in the ends? I thought you’d be in Miami right now!’”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Endz video from Kano’s new album Made in the Manor.

The dislocation between your old life and the new, the need to be grittily “real” when you are actually quite enjoying a pan-fried sea bass on a Tuesday afternoon – these dichotomies have long borne fruit in rap. They pepper Kano’s fifth album Made in the Manor, the best of his career, where loping ballads and explosive club tracks are all charged with a forensic self-analysis.

“I’m always working out how people perceive me, and that’s a hard thing to navigate sometimes,” he says. “I’ve got a friend who went to jail in 2004 just before my first album came out. I’m on TV, and they’re inside, looking at me like I’m 50 Cent. They think I’m killing it, earning mad dough every day. I’m sending him trainers and that, but it’s not enough, because he thinks I should be doing more. You fall out with a lot of people like that.”

Just as Kanye West and Drake have spent time wondering who their real friends are, Kano has seen his circle get smaller as he works out who he really wants close to him. “At some of my earliest shows, we used to roll up 20 deep – if my mates can’t come in, I can’t come in. My record label couldn’t understand it: plus-19 on the guestlist?! But that was how it was. Over the years – as it is with everyone, but amplified from being in the public – it’s got smaller and smaller. And lots is down to miscommunication, and false expectation.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kano performing an unannounced set at the end of the GRM Daily Rated awards in 2015. Photograph: Ollie Millington/Getty Images

One of the album’s strongest tracks, Strangers, sees Kano wondering how a friendship dissolved for no good reason. “It’s about my mate Dean – we’d play football together, and he was on the first couple of tours. We fell out. But there’s nothing really gone on that should stop us from being mates; he’s got two kids, I’ve never seen them, and that’s stupid. That track is an olive branch – let’s grow up, myself included.”

Another branch is proffered to his half-sister on Little Sis. “My mum and dad weren’t together when I was born. When I was a teenager, dad brought this girl round: here’s your sister. She was only two years old, and I never saw her again from that day. I moved on.”

Me and the muse: Kano on his sources of inspiration Read more

One of her friends mentioned her to him at Lovebox festival – to his horror, he’d forgotten her. “It’s a situation that’s resonated with a lot of people I’ve played it to, especially in the black community. There’s going to be so many people in the same position, feeling partly guilty. But we’re older now, we shouldn’t need [the father] to be the middleman, we should be able to reach out somehow.” This all stems from Kano wanting to “show my truth now. ‘Me and wifey just had beef, she’s trying to marry me while I’m tryna marry beats’ – at times we’re on different pages about where we want to go next in our lives. That is the truth of a 30-year-old MC.”

Rewind a decade and his truth is different: a bolshy talent at the heart of Nasty Crew, who originated grime alongside peers including Pay As You Go Cartel and Ruff Sqwad. “Initially we were spitting lyrics over garage beats, in that eight-bar gap where there wasn’t a vocal,” he says. “But we were rebellious towards garage because they were rebellious towards us; a lot of their gatekeepers said grime was too violent. Hip-hop was rebellious towards us as well: ‘You lot aren’t rappers, you’re MCs.’ We were like: ‘Fuck that, we’ll do our own thing, we’ll break all the rules.’” Grime became more than the sum of these parts: a staggeringly futurist sound of ice-burned synths, collapsing rhythms and ferocious lyrics.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest 3 Wheel-ups video from Made in the Manor

As the likes of Dizzee Rascal crossed over, major labels took notice, and suddenly grime rappers were appearing on pop-dance anthems. Kano kept his head down. “There were times I felt the pressure, from myself – do I have to do this to fit in? Is this what it is now? You don’t want to get forgotten, to get so real that you never get any play.” As well as touring the world with Gorillaz – Damon Albarn is a frequent collaborator – he made a series of LPs, each less successful than the last. With grime at a low ebb in the zeitgeist, he switched to acting, in acclaimed drama Top Boy.

But grime has found its mojo again by embracing the punkish energy that ignited it in the first place. “It feels like a second chance – doing it the right way,” Kano says. “We don’t want to make it to a mainstream audience by doing just anything. Let’s not hide the fact we’re British, when in the past we have, with American accents.” Skepta won a Mobo award for a video that cost £80; Kano went one better with Hail, costing £35. “And New Banger was just £500, and that was all spent on food and drink. In the 90s, Puffy and Busta Rhymes were doing these sick Hype Williams videos, and we were always trying to be like that, but looking like a cheaper version. It was frustrating. But this album has the best videos I’ve done. I took it into my own hands and filmed them myself, and people resonate with the realness. They’re in the places they’re familiar with, not with a lifestyle that’s foreign to them. It’s not like a slap in the face: look at this shit that you can’t have. People got proper fed up with that stuff.”

Let’s not hide the fact we’re British, when in the past we have, with American accents

But if grime has learned not to act nouveau riche, it’s still solipsistic. Last year’s two biggest tracks, Skepta’s Shutdown and Stormzy’s Shut Up, were excellent, but cleaved to the style’s two central themes of self-aggrandisement and the dismissal of rivals. “That’s in the DNA of an MC – we come from a battle culture,” Kano says. “But grime holds itself back from broader issues, and the people involved are able to speak on more stuff. People would respect their perspective but they don’t give it often enough. They dumb down, keeping it old-school: doing the one-liners, doing it how it was when we didn’t know how to be better. But as you get better, you should show that. It can’t all be nostalgic and retro.”

Instead, Kano is baring his soul, whatever the consequences. “This is why I love this record, and why I’m scared of it: some of those tunes could change my life when they get out. My dad might call me after this record, my sister might DM me. I might be friends with Dean again. Or people might say: why the fuck d’you say my name for? I really don’t know what this record will bring, but it was done with pure intentions and no negativity. It’s alive.”