This powerful follow-up to Gang Signs & Prayer is a grandstanding, soul-searching bid to crack the US – without losing that pugnacious south
London voice
“How’s the best spitter in grime so commercial?” wonders Stormzy on Wiley Flow, a standout track off his second studio album, Heavy Is the Head. It is a pointed rhetorical flourish from a man who mostly wears the mantle of street poet-king like a tracksuit made of fine silk.
It was, arguably, only a matter of time before grime threw up its true crossover star. That the genre should have found one as analytical, mould-breaking and assured as Stormzy is a particular thrill. His second album continues seamlessly on from 2017’s landmark No 1 Gang Signs & Prayer. If anything, Heavy Is the Head grandstands harder, sings more sweetly and examines the rapper’s own conscience even more attentively than before.