Mercston first came to the fore as a member of The Movement, an all-star grime link up whose number also included Ghetts and Devlin.
One of the best established MCs in the game, he's always held the line, remaining visible even at times when grime as a sound was not.
'Top Tier' is his long-awaited debut album, with Mercston bringing his 15 year experience to the fore.
It's a record that veers from UKG to afrobeats, while reinforcing the rapper's long-held love for grime.
Out now, it's a stellar record, one of our top picks from January. Clash got on the phone to Mercston to find out what's what…
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How does it feel to have the album out there?
You know what? It feels like a weight off my shoulder. And I say that because this is an album I completed in early 2018 – although there’s been some tweaks from that point, and maybe a few tracks got subtracted, and we added one or two. But it was this thing of people asking: when’s the album?! When’s the album?!
I knew I had finished it, but knew I had to wait to the right time to give it to people. So now I’ve put it out there, it’s like: yes… there you go! Basically, I stopped listening to it myself, and I said: when the world has it, I’ll listen to it from start to end. So now I’m enjoying it as a fan of myself, you know what I mean? It feels good for people to be able to have it, and feel how I felt putting the work together.
What makes this an ‘album’, as opposed to all the other projects you’ve done?
This time I had to think of different concepts more. All my projects have had different genres, but I feel like we executed moreso at this time. I knew how important it was for everything to sound expensive. Everything needed to sound expensive because I’ve been in the game for a very long time and this is my debut album, so imagine being in the game now where there’s probably two or three generations that have come after me.
I feel like a lot of artists shy away from calling their project an album. If you call it a mixtape it’s kind of like, there’s no pressure. It’s just a mixtape. But when it’s an album it’s a serious body of work. And I knew that I had to dig deep on this to get it right, and the team that I worked with – Dot Inc – we went through it.
We didn’t always agree on certain things but we knew it was important for us to put out a body of work that can be compared to whatever is out there today. And if you take away numbers or popularity, if you take it all away and listen to the music, how does it sonically sound? It needs to sound top tier, and that’s what we did.
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It’s an incredibly diverse album – moving from grime to UKG to afrobeats – was that breadth something you wanted to achieve from the outset?
So basically, I know that people class those beats as afrobeats now… but I grew up in East London, and my family are from Jamaica. So for me, on my album, you was always going to be able to hear me diving into the geezer-thing on ‘Mercs Skinner’, and then you’ll hear me speaking in patois like I’m from Jamaica and I just literally stepped off the plane.
I wanted to give the people both sides of me because that’s the music I grew up on. And I just felt it was right for me to package that up and give it to the world as my first album so you understand who Mercston is as a person and as an artist.
There’s a rich guest cast on the record, how did you pick who to get into the studio?
It’s weird because it’s like, when you’re actually putting an album together you don’t plan who to put on there. Things just kind of happen. So with ‘No Banter’ – with Wretch – it was like, I had a lot of music that was half-finished, and I wondered who to get on it.
So you send music to your friends and your peers, and you gauge what they like, and let them get creative with what they put down. With ‘No Banter’ he came down to the studio and took it over, I ended up being on 20% of the song at one point, so I had to re-evaluate! He came to do a hook, but ended up doing a hook, an intro, a verse, and an outro. And at this point I only had one verse on the song! So I stripped it back and got myself properly back involved.
‘Top Tier’ was a thing of… The Movement were regarded as a top tier collective. If I was going to do a song called ‘Top Tier’ then I felt like I had to have one because the album is called that. I didn’t want to do the song on my own. I felt it was only right to do it with members of The Movement. And that worked out well.
‘Stone Love’ features Giggs, who’s such a formidable rapper…
Yeah! Giggs doesn’t write. He just goes in. I’ve known Giggs for a long time but this is the first song that we’ve ever done together, so I was able to see how he works. We all fool ourselves when we put something down, so he’ll put something down and come out of the studio like: yo, that was sick! That line was mad! And we’ll have some banter and continue to work.
It was right for me to put him on that song because ‘Stone Love’ – again – it’s a collective, a sound from Jamaica. They’re from Jamaica and we grew up on that type of music, from our fathers or whatever. So it felt right to incorporate him on that song because I know that he understands what I’m talking about exactly on that song.
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There was a lot of talk last year about grime being dead – what was your take on it?
It’s hard to answer that! People say grime has been overtaken, but a lot of artists have come out of grime, and they’re now millionaires. So when I hear that grime is dead, I think: well, people are successful within this.
I feel like – and this is me talking to the fans right now – I understand it when people are only fans of one genre, and they want to hear that genre in one way, but I feel like as artists we always want to express ourselves, and try different things. So if we do take on a project that has 140BPM five times out of 12 tracks, it’s not a bad thing.
I think me personally, if I gave the world an album of just 140BPM it wouldn’t be as special to them. It wouldn’t be. It’s like, we heard you do that two songs ago! We need to give the artists room to express themselves, to deliver what they want to deliver. You can’t say that grime’s not doing well just because the people who come from grime mess around with different sounds.
It still falls under the same umbrella, and I only say that because hip-hop has rap, but grime has… nothing. Because people don’t like to put grime and rap together. So the umbrella is really wide, but everyone who loves grime as it once was wants it to be like that.
So when the artist isn’t doing that, it’s like: it’s dead, it’s been taken over. But when you actually look at it, Stormzy is number one in the country and that’s where he comes from! A lot of people are very successful within it. It’s a bit of a weird one, that conversation.
How does that blend work on your album, then? Is it about letting that spirit shine through on each track?
Let me give you a different type of example. You could go to university to study computers, or whatever, and when you leave, you might go to do something else, but you take something of what you’ve learned and put it elsewhere.
I wouldn’t be able to write ‘Mercs Skinner’ if I didn’t come from grime. I wouldn’t be able to write anything that I do today if I didn’t have a certain schooling that allows me to now navigate sounds, and put vocals down in different types of ways. It all starts from that school. But at some point you graduate, and you do other things – like university or college – but it doesn’t mean that you’ve forgotten where you come from. Evolution is what you need to have in order to stay relevant and also have longevity.
You’ve certainly had longevity.
For sure! It doesn’t feel that long, but it actually has!
To finish, what will you do next? Will it take eight years for a follow up?
The next plan will be a tour, because I want to be able to showcase this to the country, and make sure people enjoy it. And I want to be able to see people enjoying it how I did in the studio, when you get to play your music back. Seeing people’s reactions some times is priceless, so I want to be able to take it on the road.
But also, I want to get into the studio and get down to the nitty gritty again, because it got to the point where I wanted to continue going into the studio – like I said, this album was done in 2018, and I wanted to do more, but I was doing stuff and taking things off but you can get caught up in that. I’m ready, because my level is even higher than what people are hearing now so I’m ready to get back into the studio and do some work
. I guess the plan is now to release a body of work every year. Every year that comes there needs to be something that drops.
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'Top Tier' is out now.
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