Grime team-up goes for the W, ends up around a V…

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Thomas Inskeep: Lethal Bizzle’s new EP is titled You’ll Never Make A Million From Grime, but if anyone besides man-of-the-moment Stormzy might, it’s likely him. Bizzle’s had a trio of #11 singles in the UK, all the way back to 2004’s “Pow,” while Skepta won last year’s Mercury Music Prize and hit #2 on the album chart with Konnichiwa. Combining their formidable talents on what’s tonally the UK version (and also a better version) of DJ Khaled’s “All I Do Is Win,” they don’t just tell you they’re great; they prove it, bouncing all over the beat rapid-fire like what they are, which is two of the best emcees in the UK right now. 
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Crystal Leww: A teamup from the guy who made “RariWorkout” and the other dude who made the only grime song that a lot of Americans know should yield great results, a surefire dancefloor killer. Instead, this yields a chorus that can maybe be played twice at an Anglophile party, a Skepta verse that can be used to blend into the next Drake track, and a couple of Lethal Bizzle verses that should have been left in the studio. I’ll do rap hands to this for a minute, tops, but then I’m going back to the bar to get another scotch and soda.
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Alfred Soto: Servicable neo-garage track with a horn chart blasting through several inches of grit. 
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Julian Axelrod: Bless Mr. Bizzle for catering to a neglected demographic: grime fans that have never heard “Shutdown.” For everyone else, this sounds pretty familiar. Lethal’s verse and a half don’t make much of an impression, which wouldn’t matter if this weren’t his song. Skepta runs away with the track, double-dutching through a blindingly charismatic verse about astronomy and washing machines and his vaguely amorous relationship with your mum. But the carnival horns, the chorus cadence, even the interlude with a concerned British lady — Skepta recycles so many of his tricks you’d think it’s 2015 again. Which is fine! If I wrote “Shutdown,” I’d write it fifty more times! It’s just disappointing to see one of London’s finest spinning his wheels.
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Micha Cavaseno: An obvious attempt to cash-in on “Shutdown” by one of the less credited originators of the scene (“Oi!” still goes harder than any Dave tune). Lethal is his usual, puffed up and swaggering, while Skepta sounds slight and edutainment-like in comparison. I can’t tell whether this is just him back to his “Rescue Me” level phone-ins or whether Joseph’s just really, really eager to make sure he can get into the Breakfast Celebrity section of BBC coverage the way his good pal Stormzy can. Riddim’s completely functional, but it’s a grimey radio single, not a radio-friendly grime single, and this sort of calculation suggests that pretty soon the world is going to develop an immunity to grime’s infectious charms, which is a damn shame.
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Hannah Jocelyn: Does nothing new, but it’s everything I love about the grime I’ve heard: increasingly ridiculous bars, blaring instrumentation, and more energy than all of America’s Hot 100 put together. While the outro in the video kills the momentum, this makes a decent showing, even if it doesn’t quite win as much as Bizzle and Skepta insist they do.
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Josh Love: On the 2016 campaign trail, our president said we’re going to win so much we’re going to get tired of winning. Then the PA system would blare “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” which was probably the most unintentionally subversive thing he’s ever done. But I think it would take a whole lot longer to get tired of winning if it was soundtracked to this gleeful, snotty thumper. Better still that it comes from two rappers whose native city’s perseverance has been making an absolute mockery of our clown-in-chief for the past four days.
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Joshua Minsoo Kim: This is a Skepta ft. Lethal Bizzle track through and through. As such, “Go on then, go on then” coming before “Pow! Pow!” in the hook only seems fitting. Bizzle’s completely fine with diluting himself, though, so I suppose I’ll take what I can get. I’m not really convinced by Skepta proclaiming he’s won or Lethal B claiming he’s as hungry as he was back in the day (that “Oi!” interpolation isn’t fooling anyone, either) so let’s concede and say no one wins. That’s better than losing, I guess.
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