Is there anyone fresher in the UK rap scene right now than Pa Salieu? You’d struggle to argue against it on the strength of this blisteringly brilliant debut mixtape.
Send Them to Coventry has familiar touchstones — grime, dancehall, Afrobeat, hip-hop and more — but 22-year-old Salieu moves around in the murky space between the boundaries. He even ventures into the unexpected — the infusion of glistening soft-rock synths on More Paper is inspired. His vocal delivery is incredibly malleable, too, veering from militaristically rhythmic to vulnerably melodic, like on the sung chorus of Flip, Repeat. The momentum is unrelenting.
This has been Salieu’s year. In January he released Frontline, his biggest solo hit, sparking a slew of incendiary singles. Amid the blaring sirens and tectonic rumbles of bass of that track, which features on the mixtape, Salieu introduces us to life in Coventry, or “C-O-V, hashtag city of violence”, as he describes it on Informa.
The barbs of his past are often revisited, sometimes fiercely but often with reflection, as in the spoken-word section of T.T.M: “When the system expected me to feel sorry for myself, trap showed me how to get paid.”
It ends on a note of elevation and positivity. Mahalia layers beautiful vocals over the sunny groove of Energy, with Salieu reminding himself to “protect your energy”. Amen to that. With a creativity such as Salieu’s, the sky is the limit.
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