Northampton is not known for its music, but its proximity to London has helped it develop something of an influential outlier status within the UK’s grime and garage scenes. The town is the birthplace of the Sidewinder raves that are closely associated with many of the defining moments in grime’s first golden era, and Slowthai says an aunt of his once dated a promoter involved with the events. He recalls sneaking into shows through the fire escapes of local venues in his youth to catch touring acts from London doing their thing on stage—watching wide-eyed as grime royalty like Roll Deep, Devlin, and Ghetto coaxed reload after reload from their DJs. Bush had its own flourishing musical ecosystem too, with grime, rap, and UK garage music dominating sound systems at local parties. And with every new instrumental that would do the rounds from mobile phone to mobile phone via spotty pre-Bluetooth technology, the local buzz for grime grew.

In his early teens, Slowthai started out freestyling with the older kids from his estate. Soon enough, though, he began writing his lyrics down. “I wanted to get smart with it,” he says, explaining how he sought to add a greater level of depth and complexity to his rhymes. “I wanted to put a message out there that people won’t get.” He compares his writing process to a diary, a space in which he can not only record his experiences but also enter into dialogue with himself. Recent track “T N Biscuits” emphasizes this internalized back-and-forth: He grapples with a desire to stay rooted in his hometown despite the pull of his budding career as a self-mythologizing rapper, swinging from petty brags about how much weed he sells on his estate to comparing his smile to the Mona Lisa’s.

He sees his Northampton-bred outlook translating beyond the bounds of his town. “I want to talk to people who haven’t been heard and feel they can’t be heard,” says the rapper, who currently splits his time between his hometown and London when he’s not on tour. “I want to speak to everyone, but I only want to really speak to the people that feel it in their heart. Like it actually does something for them. And everything I’m doing, I’m learning more about myself.” And as he gathers momentum, and finds himself stage-diving from more and bigger platforms around the world, the small town he calls home is starting to feel even smaller.