“As much as I would love to break America, I don’t want to have to feel like I’m compromising anything to break a new market,” Songer says. “If that happens, it happens. If not, I’m not gonna die swimming against the tide.”
As he says this, the rapper sits at a table on the banks of the Grand Union canal, outside Paddington Station in north central London. He doesn’t live here, but it’s easy to get to on the train from his home near Reading, a broadly unremarkable town outside the British capital. He takes a sip of beer. Suddenly he seems to remember that he’s speaking to a fairly well-known American music magazine.
“I’ve always wanted to break America,” he says. “It’s the absolute dream.”
For now, it’s impressive enough that Songer has broken in the U.K. Wokingham, the small town he grew up in (just outside Reading, which is just outside London), is not known to be overflowing with rap talent. He blew up in 2017 at age 17, when a freestyle on the British YouTube channel Bl@ckbox went viral. His name became better known on home shores when “Vino Bandit,” a collaboration with the drum-and-bass producer K Motionz, crashed the U.K. singles chart. Then his own track “Toxic Freestyle,” featuring an instrumental lifted from the Britney Spears classic, became the second-highest selling U.K. rap single of 2024. For all of the U.K. rap scene’s talent, for all its brawn and bravado, its innovation in production and depiction of the country’s troubled streets, few rappers convey the turmoil inside their own heads quite like Songer.
