Notion 89: Master Peace

Though he’s already reached rock star status, London-based Master Peace only started making music as part of a bet with a mate to see who could get more listens on SoundCloud.

Although he won the bet, his mates first saw Peace making music as a joke too. “That’s why it got more listens!” The sudden confidence boost came at the right time though: due to getting in trouble at school, his uncle had threatened to send him to live with his family in Nigeria. “He was like, ‘You need to do something with your life’.” But when Peace played him one of his tracks, his uncle encouraged him to carry on —“because you never know where you’ll get.”

While at the time Peace “didn’t want to be a musician,” he says he kept at it because he had nothing else to do. Despite starting out as a grime artist regularly going on radio stations (“a lot of my characteristics intrigued people when I rapped”), it was meeting his managers that set him on the right path.

Sessions and live shows across London followed, but Peace started to feel lost. “I didn’t know what I was trying to be,” he remembers; “I knew what I wanted to be and what music I was into, but I didn’t know how to be that person.”

For a time Peace saw himself as a meme rather than a musician, recalling a freestyle on BBC 1Xtra that didn’t go to plan and led people to question whether he was a serious artist. Having been fitting between making grime, underground, indie and R&B music, he says retrospectively: “It didn’t make sense to people. They’d be like ‘Who is this kid?’ It put a lot of labels off, too. Deals would come in and they’d turn around and be like ‘We don’t really know what this is’.”

Peace says the setbacks and questioning of his credibility made it a difficult time. “I didn’t know what I was doing wrong,” he considers, “but it wasn’t that — it was that I was doing too much of something that didn’t make sense.” After a reality check courtesy of his managers (“I’d never really had anyone school me like that other than my parents”), he had a moment of realisation, saying the words ‘I want to be a pop star’. “From that, I knew where I was going.”

Building on an indie pop sound, while still incorporating elements of the hip-hop and trap music that he’d listened to growing up, Peace developed his signature sonic style. “I asked myself: ‘Instead of trying to be like another artist, how am I going to make this me?’”

Following more live shows, the hype around Master Peace grew and grew. The real test came in 2019 though: having still not dropped any music officially, debut single “Night Time” attracted attention from JME, who later jumped on for the remix. “That was the moment everyone realised what I wanted to be,” Peace asserts.

With the anticipation built, Peace and his managers planned a headline show at Omeara in London at the start of last year. Despite him having just one single out, it sold out within a week. “After that, I knew we could do this,” he remembers thinking. But then the pandemic came along and put a stop to his plans.

He describes the year since as “a survival of the fittest type of situation.” Mentally, and in general, staying relevant and putting out new music posed new challenges. The first few months, he says, were extremely hard. “I would be in my room every day in my pyjamas, and often in bed while on FaceTime to my managers telling them how unmotivated I felt. It felt like the days were just going and nothing was happening.”

With live show plans on hold, Peace spent his time creating his debut EP, Love Bites, which he released at the end of 2020. “Making it made me feel like myself again,” he reflects. Soon after dropping it, he started work on its follow up: the mosh pit-ready indie pop of his new project, Public Display of Affection, which is full of throwbacks to the mid-00s indie days.

“The main blueprint is guitar-based music,” Peace explains, citing Arctic Monkeys and Bloc Party as two major influences as well as the drum patterns of rappers Trippie Redd and Playboi Carti. “It comes from different places, but it’s all mixed together to sound like its own thing” — “Overdrive”, for example, is far from your average indie pop song.

More than anything, the EP bursts with energy — which is exactly how Peace wants people to react when they listen to it. “I want them to jump off of their seats and be like ‘What the fuck is this?’ Everyone needs to hear it,” he says. “I don’t want people to think it’s just nice indie music… No! It needs to be fully on or there’s no point. I’m not trying to come nice.”

“It’s hard to stay at this one place,” Peace considers, saying that rather than being categorised by genre, he wants to start his own genre: “So people think, ‘That’s the Master Peace sound’.” And with live venues reopening imminently, everything seems to be aligning once again. “We’re about to turn the volume right up,” Peace beams — “and get active again!”

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