Jimothy Lacoste - The Safeway

The Guardian 80

(Black Butter)
The young Londoner’s hypnotic bedroom rap both wrongfoots and charms

Self-taught musician Jimothy Lacoste makes bedroom pop that could be Flight of the Conchords satirising the Streets. Quirky and witty, he raps with a studied precision about girls, money and clothes (all good) and drugs (not good). This remarkable debut often sounds like Jimothy loves everything about hip-hop except its music and culture. This is confusing, and some will dismiss him as a middle-class ironist cosplaying a rapper. His intentions would matter less if he wasn’t so prodigiously talented.

The 21-year-old Londoner’s deadpan delivery is disarmingly simple, as is his relentless repetition of addictive loops, riffs and melodies, narcotic in their effect. During four years of dropping tracks, Lacoste’s singular style has never changed, but its execution has improved. Getting Remedy is a brutally funky 80s banger, Getting Molly a beautiful evocation of drug comedowns, a regretful drawl from under the duvet.