Bugzy Malone

Liberating grime from its London domicile in the mid-2010s, Bugzy Malone firmly implanted Manchester on the rap map with confessional storytelling in an unmistakable Mancunian gruff. Born Aaron Davis in Greater Manchester in 1990 to a single-parent mother, a young Bugzy Malone followed in his uncle’s criminal footsteps. After being expelled from school and enduring homelessess as a teen, Malone finally escaped street life after a prison sentence at the age of 16 served as a catalyst. Turning his life around as an amateur boxer before deciding upon a full-time career in rap, Malone released his introspective debut EP, Walk With Me, in 2015, a territorial reworking of grime whose title track installed Manchester’s area code (0161) as a regional rap mantra. Its follow-up, 2016’s Facing Time, found Malone wrestling with the rigours of fame and unbosoming himself of traumatic stress, themes he would expand upon in 2017’s resolute declaration of provincial sovereignty, King of the North. Malone’s independent success was ratified in 2018 with his first full-length album, B. Inspired, a proper fusion of grime, Afro-swing, speed garage and hip-hop, typified by “Die By the Gun”, a reflective third-person tale of the turbulent Manchester street life he fortuitously left behind to become a trailblazer for Northern hip-hop.