Danny Brown has always been somewhat of an outlier in hip-hop. Gifted with the ability to present his many exploits with astounding shades of colour, humour and vocal inflections verging on the maniacal, his unorthodox style has garnered support across the globe, far beyond his home city of Detroit. Brown’s skill in synthesising his wide-ranging influences – he has confessed to being a fan of everything from Cee-Lo Green to Bowie and Joy Division – culminated in 2016’s Atrocity Exhibition on Warp. A remarkable collection depicting the highs and lows of mental health and the ugly underbelly of the hip hop world, its outstandingly…
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It’s about two in the afternoon and the sun is peeking out from behind a blanket of clouds to kiss the grounds of Kilmainham with intermittent drops of light and heat. The first few punters are entering the fields surrounding Ireland’s Museum of Modern Art for Forbidden Fruit, a weekend festival that showcases local and international talent for thousands amongst the idyllic surroundings of the IMMA grounds. Opening up the festival on the District Stage is a local artist: April, an RnB-inspired singer-songwriter from County Kildare. Being the first act of the weekend is always a daunting task, it is…
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Danny Brown with support from ZelooperZ live at the Academy in Dublin. Photos by Lucy Foster.
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Danny Brown’s flair for off kilter delivery and taste for unusual production has garnered a cult following since the Detroit rapper’s earliest mixtapes. Subsequently, studio albums like XX and Old found a much wider audience for his tales of drink and drug fuelled escapades, placing Brown as the oddball at the very edge of the rap mainstream. Brown’s brutally honest confessions made him a fascinating figure: avoiding the hip-hop clichés of purely revelling in debauchery, Brown seemed genuinely compelled towards such levels of self-abuse. A series of concerning tweets from 2014, in which the rapper took aim at a lack of support in the rap industry…
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Joining the likes of headliners Hozier, Alt-J and The Chemical Brothers, seventeen new acts have been confirmed to play this year’s Longitude Festival. Taking place in Dublin’s Marlay Park over the weekend of Friday, July 17, the festival has revealed the following new additions to the schedule, with more still to be announced: James Blake, The Vaccines, Metronomy, Pusha T, Todd Terje, Danny Brown, Glass Animals, Everything Everything, Toro y Moi, Daphni, Jose Gonzalez, Catfish and the Bottlemen, Years & Years, Ibeyi, Benjamin Booker, Tove Lo, The Districts. Tickets are on sale now.
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Having spent the better part of fifteen years producing some of the grimiest, dub heavy-ragga-techno-dancehall (of course it’s a genre… right?) as well as building an extensive, impressive roster of collaborations, it isn’t surprising that the latest EP from The Bug (Kevin Martin) is titled Filthy, or features some of the biggest names associated with Grime, Hip Hop and Dancehall providing the truly terrifying MC duties. Delving into his back catalogue of releases and remixes, it’s easy to see that Martin has always had a knack for making music that could comfortably soundtrack an end of the world scenario; his production…
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U.S. rapper Danny Brown played two intimate nights at the Sugar Club in Dublin last weekend. And as it so happens, our photographer David Sexton was there to capture all the madness…