Digital Cover: p-rallel is Shifting Gears

It’s a muggy Tuesday evening, and London has veered into near-subtropical territory. Everyone’s gearing up to make the pilgrimage to the legendary Glastonbury festival, and p‑rallel is en route to join them. It’ll be his sixth time playing there, he tells me. That detail lands differently when you realise he’s only just turned 26. Early on in our conversation, the scale of his trajectory starts to come into focus.

The future doesn’t arrive all at once. It comes in pockets, through scenes, soundsystems, and in the hands of individuals who resist being defined by one structure. If anyone embodies that right now, it’s west London’s p‑rallel. He practices a kind of creative alchemy. Mercurial by design, unpinned by genre. “I want it get to the point where everyone knows I can do whatever I want with my music,” he says. “It’s kind of liminal. I’m just doing whatever feels right and then seeing what the reaction is after.”

From the moment he emerged on the scene, p‑rallel showed a keen ability to sculpt beats with the intricacy of UK garage, bending the scene’s urgency into something more fluid and playful. Even when his tracks bounce with infectious ease, there’s often a subtle pull: a strange allure that draws the listener closer. This kind of constant motion carries through in our conversation. “I’m already making music for the end of next year to release,” he tells me, matter-of-factly. His work ethic has been solid from the jump. He entered the scene at 15, watching, listening, absorbing. He was surrounded by older artists, friends and family who were already fully embedded. “They were all about 30 or older. I was just the kid in the back of the room,” he says. “I can’t really just pick things up by sitting down and researching. I learn through observation.”

Now, a decade later, that same hunger is complemented by a sharper sense of self. “I think for the past 10 or so years that I’ve been making music, I was sitting in the learner’s seat, still trying to figure everything out,” he reflects. “Not to say I have it figured out now, but I’ve gotten to a point where I can stand my ground and know with more confidence: this is it, this is what we’re doing. Up until now, everything has felt like more of a trial and error.”

In conversation, he’s calm and collected, exuding the sort of groundedness that only comes from years spent grafting. On record, though, p‑rallel is restless. His catalogue stretches from four-to-the-floor beats to rubbery dance tracks that draw from disco, garage, funky house, jungle and beyond. p‑rallel’s debut mixtape Forward, released in 2020, featured friends such as Fredwave, Jeshi, Sam Wise and Rachel Chinouriri.  Movement followed in 2023: ​“It’s one for the clubs. It’s not for radio or anything, it’s just for the raving crew,” he says of the record.

Lately, p-rallel has been in his zone. Clinically locked in to every snare, kickdrum, drop, horn or wavy synth in his music, and every bit of motion on and off the stage. His most recent EP, Can’t Be Me, is the sharpest crystallisation of that sensibility yet. “I came back from a trip to Thailand and I knew what I wanted to do with my music,” he says. “It was the first break I’ve had in a long time.” What followed was a focused stretch in the studio with Dom Valentino, locking in almost every weekend for two months. The result marked a new turn in the road; his first release under his own label, Nevermind.

Since then, the milestones have stacked up. He’s sold out his first show at KOKO, a venue he used to frequent religiously as a fan, in 2023, and he’s currently juggling multiple projects. This includes a joint tape with his older brother Kadeem Tyrell and another solo EP due later this year. Take his latest single, ‘Sorry I’m Like This’, featuring Blanco. The verse was recorded almost a year and a half ago, but at the time, p‑rallel wasn’t fully sold on the beat. It was only after a session with London-based producer ODF that things clicked. They made a new instrumental, dug into the vault for the right verse, and Blanco’s bars slotted in like they were made for it. “I floated it to him and he was down,” he says. He’s been teasing it in his sets ever since, fine-tuning the track until it felt just right.

The groundwork for this kind of intuitive approach was laid early. His dad, a DJ, was always playing music around him. His parents even met at a rave. “I don’t really think I started searching for music until I was about nine or ten,” he says. “Everything prior to that, I was just subliminally hypnotised by certain sounds. I was surrounded by so much music.” 

For his 26th birthday, he went back to Berlin, his fourth visit in the last few years. “Every time I go there I learn something new. I find a whole different sub-genre of music, I meet new people,” he says. What draws him back isn’t just the music, but the culture around it. The sense of freedom and lack of pretence. “We don’t have anything that matches it in the UK. Being able to actually go to a rave in a warehouse that’s been done really well. There are no phones, there’s none of that rubbishness. It brings me back to what I imagine raving was like back in the day.”

It’s that simplicity he craves. “I feel like every DJ needs to go back to DJing in the corner of the club with nothing but a little dangly light on them,” p-rallel explains, reminiscing about the intimacy of a long night out, bumping elbows with strangers, in previous years. Music takes on a different kind of power when it’s played in a dimly lit nightclub. It develops histories. It conjures possible futures. In the smallest of ways, it changes lives. Dance music takes its sounds from across the world, but if it’s about one thing, it’s about bodies colliding in the pursuit of momentary elation. It’s about motion, and joy, and straining towards something greater between the kick drums. 

On one hand, p‑rallel distils the precision of UK garage, house and disco into sticky, dancefloor-ready grooves; on the other, he melts those same elements into booming, genre-blurring experiments. His sound evokes the spirit of early ’90s raves – events the west Londoner was too young to attend, yet whose DNA runs through his veins, driving a pulse he channels into music that’s as expansive and instinctive as it is technically sharp and deeply felt.