Trap. Trapo. The UK Rap savant from south of the river; the king of Drill who, according to the crown bearer himself, hasn’t been making music of the genre since 2018. After all, the Lambeth mainstay has his gaze firmly fixed on his own trajectory rather than the scene that he has gate-kept for over half a decade. “In terms of the direction of [Drill], it can go wherever it needs to go,” he says. “I’m not one of them people that’s like, ‘Drill’s changed, it’s all this and all that.’ It has changed because there’s new people.” The rapper is reasoning with his collaborator, confidant and fellow British Rap trendsetter Krept, one half of famed Rap duo: Krept & Konan.
Trap and Krept grew up down the road from each other, with the latter five or so years the former’s senior. Krept was a great source of inspiration for the young Trap, but nowadays it’s a level playing field; they’re contemporaries and equals rather than influencee and influencer. Both are amongst the UK’s most cherished rappers, they’ve toured together, worked together on various releases such as 2019’s “I Spy” and 2022’s “Who Wanna”, and built a bond beyond the courtesy “Wagwans” of their early encounters. “I remember man on man’s pushbike and all of those kinds of things,” Krept reminisces with Trap via Zoom. “There were bare brief interactions but that’s just how it is in the ends, there’s so many people, we’ll be chilling 10, 20 people. But as we grew as two people [I realised] that we have the same kind of aspirations and vision.”
K-Trap has one of the densest and most compelling discographies in the UK Rap landscape. Over the past eight or so years he’s shared a plethora of mixtapes, both in solo and collaborative form, with various scene classics found across his work, from “Maths” to “Warm,” “Edgware Road” with LD to “Xtra Time” with Blade Brown. This summer though, Trap’s definitive career moment to date has arrived: his debut album, Smile?. Across 19 eclectic cuts the 28-year-old expands his sound into unfounded sonic terrains, exploring himself and his sonic capabilities in a way that, although he’s certainly touched on with previous releases, is now accentuated, fluid and strikingly visceral. The record presents Trap as a thoughtful, fearless and flawed protagonist; now that he has escaped the concrete jungle that was once all that he knew, Rap’s Byronic hero grapples with the new challenges in his life, reflects on his past, and flaunts a romantic nature that lies in the midst of his mettle.
With Krept just as eager as the rest of us to find out more from his old friend, he asks the question that we all want to know: who is K-Trap, the man without the mask?
