Songer

Hip-hop has gone through a series of evolutions since bursting out of The Bronx in the ‘70s. From the sociopolitical philosophies of Public Enemy to the more controversial subject matters of gangsta rap, it’s a genre that’s managed to transfix for over five decades, metamorphosising with the times to help us celebrate, confront and understand the world around us. When Grandmaster Flash disclosed, “Don’t push me ‘cause I’m close to the edge, I’m trying not to lose my head / It’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under,” he opened up a conversation around hip-hop and mental health, ushering in a wave of conscious wordsmiths unafraid to talk about how they really feel.  

 

More than ever, artists are publicly acknowledging their struggles, helping to progress the narrative and normalise mental health discourse as superstars like Jay Z, Kendrick Lamar and Kid Cudi peel back the curtains and lure listeners into deeply personal aspects of their lives. For charting rapper Songer, exploring the power of music as a therapeutic outlet forms the groundwork for his fifth project, THE PRICE OF THERAPY.  

 

“I can only write what I think, what I see and how I feel,” he explains, mulling over his thoughts,“I love life, and day to day I’m a happy human being, but I do have those moments and the way I deal with them is to write.” In his landmark study ‘Hip-hop Therapy’, Dr Edgar Tyson produces a framework that analyses the inherently cathartic components of hip-hop and how it’s made, promoting its capacity for mental health treatment. Across nine tracks, Songer shines a light on this, coming to grips with the positive and negative consequences of using music to help, taking aim at the anxieties that have come on his journey.  

 

The Reading rapper and I meet via Zoom two days before the project is released. Sinking into the comfort of a studio sofa, he’s taking a break from putting the finishing touches on ‘THOUGHT PARK’, a cinematic introduction that reveals the album’s subtle melancholia. “This a little window to my life and then in summer I’ve gone clear / I live at Thought Park, it’s up and downs for the whole year,” he delivers in deep baritones on the opening verse, pre-warning fans of the mixtape’s darker themes.   

With no features and a 30-minute run time, Songer likes that THE PRICE OF THERAPY delivers a statement, one which shows his ability to make a high-level rap project on his own. “I never want to get successful from something that doesn’t feel like me. That’s my biggest fear,” he says, adjusting his signature baseball cap to one side. “It feels like the right moment to drop a meaningful body of work, so that no matter what happens now, at least I can say I was being honest.” Timing is everything in music. This year, Songer spent eight consecutive weeks in the UK singles chart for the Britney Spears-sampling ‘Toxic (Freestyle)’. His response? Producing a Freudian project that uncovers his ails and egoisms and attempts to habituate the realities of stardom.  

 

‘IF THE SKY WOULD STAY BLUE’ is one of the mixtape’s most revealing moments: littered with diaristic anecdotes of his desolations, the track meanders through six minutes of tear-jerking lo-fi hip-hop. “I need a hug from my mum, I’ve been smothered with anxiety for years / so to name it wasn’t jumping a gun, at least my therapy’s fun,” he remarks. Lyrically, it feels like he’s laying down on a velvet chaise lounge, looking up at the ceiling deep in conversation with his councillor. But the record isn’t all despair, ‘BEWARE OF THE DOG’ sees him barking braggadocios witticisms like a pitbull ripping through chunks of meat, spitting with a bloodthirstiness to highlight his resolute list of achievements. Each track takes on its own personality, firing up punchlines that hip-hop heads will be unravelling for years to come.   

 

Songer grew up in Wokingham, Reading, born into a family that loved music but none of whom had pursued it as a career. His dad would take him to gigs but discovering hip-hip coincided with an exploration of poetic expression that the man born James Songer simply couldn’t ignore. Freestyling on school breaks, alongside a healthy dose of peer pressure from friends, helped him realise the unorthodox gift he had for someone from the city. Nevertheless, in person, he comes across staggeringly normal. “I’m a son, friend and a brother, first and foremost. They’re my biggest concerns,” he says without hesitation. “I don’t gravitate towards fame. I’m not desperate to get bigger and I’m not desperate to be more well known. I feel like that will be a natural consequence of making good music.”   

 

It’s this disarming humility that’s helped Songer reach his dizzying heights. Everything changed when, on February 20th 2018, BL@CKBOX uploaded ‘S13 Ep. 102’ of their freestyle series to YouTube. Platforming emerging artists, the feature had previously welcomed J Hus, Abra Cadabra and Potter Payper to the booth. However, none of their videos made an impact quite like his. Sitting handsomely on 7 million streams, at just 17, Songer showcased a mind-boggling command of language and flow which – coupled with a savvy ability to transform relatable realities into vivid punchlines – presented a fearlessness that makes you instantly want to hit the replay button. The six minutes of relentless wordplay announced him as one of the first in his generation to be able to speak directly to a nationwide constituency with a swagger entirely his own. “BL@CKBOX utterly believed in me, there was never an inkling of doubt. Being from a place like Reading, they made me realise that I really can do this,” he affirms.  

Chewing up Britney’s ‘Toxic’ and spitting it all over the UK top 40, Songer’s ‘Toxic (Freestyle)’ takes three famed verses from that BL@CKBOX moment and makes them into a hit. Declaring himself as Britain’s hottest rapper for two consecutive months, it took six years for those lyrics to chart, and yet, people are chanting them in 2024 with all the verve Songer shows in the original video. “I’ve been lucky that these bars have taken me to the biggest point in my career. It’s not my favourite verse I’ve ever done,” he confesses, “but it’s given me the most opportunities, crazy memories and cool experiences. I’ll always love it.”  

 

Songer toyed with the idea of covering ‘Pump It’ by The Black Eyed Peas, before realising just how well ‘Toxic’ worked with his flow. Are there any other pop jams he’s itching to work on? “I’ve written to ‘Kiss Me More’ by Doja Cat and SZA before,” he says. “If it sounds good, then why not release it?” This train of thought could explain his proneness to virality. Although he admits that chasing hits has never concerned him, it’s something he’s navigated organically.   

 

In fact, THE PRICE OF THERAPY’s very existence is in retaliation to his recent flirtations with chart success and pop culture. Taking the baseball cap off completely, he relays the pros and cons of his intensifying online successes before hyper-fixating on how he wants to be seen as an artist.  “The viral moments have happened, and they’ve worked for me, which is a blessing, but I want to be respected for my love of music and seen as someone who doesn’t just follow what is already working.”   

 

Not that it ever went away, but DnB has experienced somewhat of a revival since the pandemic. Providing hedonistic escapism during lockdown while soundtracking the TikTok algorithms of Gen Z, the genre’s scratchy breaks, splitting melodies and screeching fog horns have influenced some of the biggest hits produced by twentysomething artists this decade. For Songer, the turbocharged sounds of the ‘90s gave him his entry point to performing, firing lyrics at DnB nights like bullets from a gun.   

The discipline suited his punchline-heavy bars and visceral flows, teaching him how to control a crowd and hold down the dance. He recalls Devilman and Mr Traumatik being played at house parties: two legends that he collaborated with on ‘Balling’ by Vibe Chemistry. More recently, he flipped a Ruff Sqwad classic, ‘Together’, with K Motionz into the outlandish jump up anthem, ‘Vino Bandit’. A few months later, Becky Hill and Chase & Status tapped his speedy egocentricities for ‘Disconnect’. In Songer, the scene has a fresh-faced lyrical talisman that can ride the hyper-fast breakbeats and restless tempos with striking ease.  

 

It was The Sunrise Project where we first heard him flexing his DnB muscles on record. Creating a different kind of buzz, ‘Look At The Clouds’ traded quotable one liners for breezy autotune, driven by a need to make sense of his belonging. “Look at the clouds / We ain’t got time for another life / ‘Cause swear down right now I’m loving mine,” he concedes over Qbit’s liquid drums production. Still, it’s the variations of hip-hop that pull through on The Sunrise Project, as he beams hard bars over jazz-inflicted trap, sample-heavy boom bap and Latin-tinged road rap. From there, his experimental odyssey continued on SKALA. Kaleidoscopic sounds, that travel from UKG to jungle and R&B, opened new doors in his ever-expanding sonic universe, delivering tracks primed for the dancefloor and moments of contemplation in pulse-racing flows.   

 

Songer’s ability to cover all grounds is partly owed to a cultish following, who relate to the fact that he comes across as just an ordinary dude – someone that you’d bring to the pub with your mates or play five aside football with on the weekend but who also stands out as one of the best lyricists of his generation. At his first headline show, in the intimate settings of OMEARA London, the sold out 320 capacity venue sang the ‘Sunrise’ instrumental before he’d even graced the stage. The night before, he couldn’t sleep; Songer laid in bed nervously, catastrophising all the possible eventualities of a disastrous debut gig. He needn’t have worried as, with the help of the crowd, he walked off stage with a renewed sense of purpose, having seen first-hand the impact his music had on others.  

Fast forward to a sunny bank holiday weekend in 2023, and Songer had packed out Reading Festival’s 1Xtra tent. For a local lad who’d frequented the festival every summer since he was 15, such a full circle moment can come with its own jeopardy. Did it live up to his expectations? “It was the best day of my life,” he grins. Standing on stage in front of thousands of sweating teens, Songer’s lyrics marshalled the crowd like a general leading his troops into battle. Mosh pits crumbled on top of one another while basslines injected an instant fix of a dopamine hit, rattling the teeth that sang his verses back to him. His mum, on her birthday, proudly watched from the side.  

 

Two weeks after our initial Zoom call, Songer is clad in baggy Champion fits posing for photos in Studio Notion. He presents a laidback figure – partly natural but also the biproduct of a fatiguing sold-out tour, which saw him embark on six dates across the UK. His schedule is still unrelenting, with shows over June, July and August in Zanté as well as a slew of performances during festival season, including at Boardmasters. For Songer, it’ll be a very British summer, taking in Greek party Islands and overcoming the stench of stale lager to conquer stages in muddy fields, all the while nestling in pub gardens to watch the Euros (he thinks England will lose in the final, again), as he looks to recuperate and capitalise on a breakout year.   

 

Despite his rapid ascendancy, Songer promises the reason he makes music will always stay the same. As our conversation winds to a close, he’s keen to emphasise that, although music is primarily a therapeutic outlet for himself, he doesn’t take lightly the affect it can have on others. “Giving people moments of clarity is the biggest privilege I have. I’m lucky that I have something that helps me clear the air, but there are a lot of people who can’t. If my music can for them, that’s amazing.”