Stormzy’s third album is out on New Music Friday – stream it right here.
It was a ‘music camp’ which helped to craft Stormzy’s follow-up to the blockbuster Heavy Is The Head, one leading to collaborations with the likes of Nao, Sampha and GRADES.
“When you hear about music camps they always sound intense and sombre,” he said of This Is What I Mean. “People saying: ‘We need to make an album.’ ‘We need to make some hit records.’ But this felt beautifully free.”
“We’re all musicians but we weren’t always doing music. Some days we played football or walked around taking pictures. And the bi-product to that was very beautiful music.”
“Because when you marry that ethos with world class musicians and the best producers, writers and artists in the world, and we’re in one space, that’s a recipe for something that no one can really imagine.”
“You can’t even calculate what that’s going to come up with. And it came up with a big chunk of this album.”