British rapper and self-described “child of Grime” Stormzy has released his third studio album This Is What I Mean. It comes three years after the 29-year-old’s sophomore album, Heavy Is The Head (2019) and five years after his debut album, Gang Signs & Prayer (2017).
Comprising 12 songs, the new album sees Stormzy take on a number of themes, such as in Please, where he speaks on forgiving his father, and in I Got My Smile Back, where he takes a spin on paranoia, depression and self-doubt.
Executively produced by British producer PRGRSHN, This Is What I Mean includes the top 10 single Hide & Seek and Stormzy’s latest release Firebabe. Sampha, Jacob Collier and Debbie are some of this album’s guest artists.
Stormzy mostly worked on this album while in a music camp on Osea Island, a remote island on the Essex estuary. “When you hear about music camps they always sound intense and sombre,” said Stormzy. “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.”