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"N.A.Z." Track unavailable



This poll is decided by the votes of RA staff members and current contributors.

is 2016.It's distorted patriotism. It's immigrant identity. It's numbness through repetition. It's memes. It's uncertainty. It's the decision between engagement and detachment. It's noisy, it's tangled, it's complicated. Dean Blunt, DJ Escrow and Gassman D's debut album as Babyfather isn't a direct commentary on the world's collective headspace in 2016, but it feels like a reflection of it.It's also an incredibly sick hip-hop and digi-dub record. Blunt left behind the indie expressions ofand, his last two solo records, to pursue soundsystem pressure and weed-drenched bars. The album transmits like pirate radio, with DJ Escrow, voice pitched high, playing host. He guides us through post-Timbaland rollers ("Meditation"), Tubby-esque head-nodders ("Shook") and emotional bangers ("Deep"). Arca and Micachu, two other visionary London-based artists, stop by the show for guest appearances. These tracks, and plenty of others, found Blunt in some of the best form of his career, and they gave the smoke-filled Babyfather live shows a bass-heavy centre of gravity. Escrow's waspish presence at the centre of the record, along with several pure noise tracks and the album's now infamous refrain—"This makes me proud to be British"—madeone of 2016's most challenging and talked-about listens. Sure, you could edit out these bits in a playlist, but that would mean compressing this record's rich identity and missing this:"We're all divided and that, there's no unity and that… If we all linked up, we could do a big ting, you know… Man's just trying to unify the ting, play a nice little rhythm… And then just take that attitude, that vibe, to man's politics and man's economics and that."