“I think I rejected every deal that came my way. Navigating the label bidding war must have been surreal. When you get with a label, you can get complacent too quickly if you haven’t got the right head on you.” That’s why when labels were offering large amounts of money to control everything, I felt like I still needed to promote my music in the ends. My boy Rambo was like, ‘This is calm’, but no one was feeling the song to the degree they do now. None of my bros really rated ‘Situation’ like that when they first heard it. I’m trying to get much more involved with the production side of things.”ĭid you ever envisage ‘Situation’ blowing up in the way that it did? My habits have changed over the past two years since I started: instead of using YouTube beats, I can make the beat myself with the producer. Right now I don’t have my own studio, and I often head to wherever the producer is. “I never used to record in my uni bedroom – my early songs were made in a friend of mine’s room who had some decent equipment. When you dropped your first couple of singles, you were still at university. The R&B inspiration came from my mum: Craig David, Maxwell, Musiq Soulchild and John Legend albums often sat by the CD player.” After a while, my manager told me that I’m not even that good at rapping, to be honest, and I should stick to singing. Everyone was like, ‘Oh shit, do it again’. “Probably when I was rapping with my boys, I’d drop a melody right in the middle of it and then go back to rapping. What made you want to transition from rapping to singing? I started rapping at first, but Drake was a big inspiration when I saw him do both and do it well.” I was a Channel AKA, P Money and JME kid. Hanging around my boys growing up, the stereotype was that if you sang you were a bit lame, you were wet. I come from north London – ends – where there weren’t options for me to be a theatre kid or get singing lessons. NME : What does “hood R&B” represent for you? NME recently caught up with Nippa to discuss working with Craig David, his own journey so far and his thoughts on the changing UK R&B landscape. “To listen to Craig David’s ‘Born To Do It’ growing up is one thing, but to make a song with him is just crazy, man,” Nippa says of the opportunity. The pair have since struck up a creative relationship, resulting (so far) in the swanky, synth-heavy June single ‘G Love’. The arrival of the EP, meanwhile, came around the same time as its creator opened for the LA rapper Blxst on the latter’s UK tour, an opportunity that led Nippa to meeting UK garage legend Craig David. Nippa’s self-titled debut EP then followed in November 2021, featuring the likes of ‘I Know’, ‘Pay The Price’ (which place the listener on a late-night train ride through the frontal cortex) and ‘Confidence’, which pulls subtle cues from Drake and Bryson Tiller’s playbook.īy interlinking the EP with tales of block life, romance and partying, Nippa’s brand of “hood R&B” finally connected with the cultural consciousness, resulting in a frantic label bidding war. The following year, his Toronto hip-hop-inspired single ‘Ride Or Die’ and the trap-soaked ‘Situation’ both caught ablaze on social media, with the latter grabbing the attention of super-producer Boi-1da ( Kanye West, Rihanna, Kendrick Lamar). The 22-year-old, real name Jordan Adebiyi, properly introduced himself in late 2020 with the tracks ‘Squeezin’ Ya’ and ‘Change My Tone’, which were recorded when Nippa was studying at the University of Kent. Delivered with his soulful and playful charisma, the north London artist’s music, he tells NME, is “a combination of everything I grew up on, from grime down to my mum’s R&B CDs”. Hailing from Tottenham, the stomping ground of the pioneering likes of Skepta, Wretch 32 and Jme, Nippa is currently championing his “hood R&B” sound.
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