The enterprise of reviewing the debut album by Central Cee entails a degree of safety you seldom encounter in 2025: no info is offered past the tracklist. His document label appears at a loss to let you know who produced it, there aren’t any lyrics to make clear the knottier moments of the rapper’s famously torrential move; the main points of a few of the visitor artists – the proprietor of the Billie Eilish-esque voice on Now We’re Strangers, or the potent soul vocal on nearer Don’t Know Anymore – can be apparently categorised. However maybe safety isn’t actually the purpose: artists who’re actually involved about pre-release leaks simply drop their albums unannounced. The entire palaver appears extra about selling the concept Can’t Rush Greatness is a really huge deal certainly.

Effectively, in fact it’s. If a few of the claims concerning Central Cee’s success and its spoils on Can’t Rush Greatness sound suspiciously just like the lily being gilded – Does he actually make use of a non-public chef? Is it right, as visitor Skepta proudly claims on Ten, that he’s among the many 10 largest rappers on the planet? – he’s nonetheless, unquestionably, the dominant identify in UK rap. Non-public chef or not, the house counties pile that Can’t Rush Greatness says Oakley Neil Caesar-Su now calls dwelling have to be working out of wall area for the variety of platinum discs he’s amassed over the past 4 years. Furthermore, Central Cee has executed the one factor nobody actually anticipated a British rapper to do, and succeeded within the ice-to-eskimos enterprise of breaking America. “No person else from London’s gone Hollywood,” he swaggers on CRG, as you may in the event you had to date scored three platinum US singles. It’s an achievement not fully with out precedent, though you’d have to return 35 years, to the handful of US hits scored by Monie Love, to discover a British rapper who achieved something even remotely comparable.

Understandably, you may’t miss the sense of confidence that infects Can’t Rush Greatness. Some moments appear targeted on sustaining Central Cee’s US success, with options from US rappers outweighing these from British ones. (Gata, with its acoustic guitars and vocals from Puerto Rican act Younger Miko, has clearly been constructed with one eye on the huge Latin-American market.) However it by no means eschews its British identification: splendidly, at one juncture, a love rival is dismissed as a “plonker”. The manufacturing fully eschews pop hooks in favour of intriguing particulars: the bizarre second in Don’t Know Anymore the place the pitch of the monitor lurches as if somebody’s sped up the recording; the sudden shift in sonic texture halfway by way of Stroll In Wardrobe, the place chattering beats and electrical piano give solution to thick synth chords, amping up the stress because it does. And there are subtly deployed samples from, amongst others, Ne-Yo and the Wu-Tang Clan.

The impact is to focus your speedy consideration on Central Cee’s voice. It’s a sensible transfer. He’s technically very adept – well slicing the samples into his personal rhymes so it seems like they’re engaged in dialogue; he’s by no means overshadowed by his friends and albeit raps rings round Lil Child on Band4Band. Extra importantly, he has stuff to say. The album’s central subject could be very acquainted – the disparity between the rapper’s pre-fame and post-fame life – however his tackle it’s intriguingly unique. Reasonably than merely swagger, or insist that nothing has actually modified, he admits to confusion, consistently undercutting his boasts with expressions of discomfort at his wealth (“I really feel like a snob”) and the sheer quantity of people that depend on it (“If I don’t pay the payments then who will?”), brazenly copping to the truth that he retains contradicting himself. The 70s soul samples of High Freestyle play host to each apparently impregnable self-confidence (“I’ll get a No 1 album, straightforward”) and worries that his success might show fragile: “I’m one cease and search away from the block.” “Don’t belief anybody who says ‘I’m actual’” he snaps at one level, including, glumly: “I’m actual.”

It finally appears like a really trustworthy, life like depiction of sudden-onset fame on an unimaginable scale, the place, as Limitless places it: “I’m residing in a film however I can’t press pause.” It’s crammed with highly effective specifics: the revelation that among the many duties his wealth has introduced him lurks the duty of paying for his friends’ funerals; his wrestle to sleep with out what he calls “hood atmosphere” (“the sound of sirens”). Maybe he’ll get extra used to it in time: actually, there’s little or no about Can’t Rush Greatness that means it’s prone to dent Central Cee’s exceptional progress.

This week Alexis listened to

Kin’Gongolo Kiniata – Kingongolo
With their devices made out of discovered supplies – plastic bottles, plates, scrap steel – there’s a way that Kinshasa’s Kin’Gongolo Kiniata are descendents of fellow DRC mavericks Konono No 1: their debut single is frantic and thrilling.