Wow; what a year for this guy. 24 year-old Bugzy Malone hailing from a “little town called Manchester” has made shockwaves in the grime scene in the past year. Following on from his excellent Chipmunk diss ‘Relegation Riddim’, Bugzy has just released the Walk With Me EP, containing surely his best work yet. Any fan of grime needs to take a look at Bugzy and be inspired how one man has literally put “Manny on the map”.
Bugzy has certainly stuck to his guns on this EP, keeping that raw Manchester sound in his songs, and it’s one thing that sets him apart from other artists, as well as his consistently solid lyrics, backed up by excellent beats that compliment his flow perfectly. The EP has a clear, crisp sound and feels like it was intelligently planned to keep the mixture of Bugzy’s often deep and emotional bars separate from the harder grime tracks such as ‘Watch Your Mouth’ and ‘Get Gassed’, featuring lyrics such as “I could do to the top what I’ve done to the bottom, everybody’s in danger / I got dissed off a pop star, and I went sick, turned into the black Power Ranger.”
As previously mentioned, Bugzy frequently uses rather emotional and hard-hitting lyrics in his songs, such as the song ‘M.E.N’ where he talks about his harsh upbringing in Moss Side and uses the lyrics “Hope I don’t bump in to my step-dad/ Cos they say mental abuse is worse than physical abuse and I wanna get him back/ But I don’t wanna do another custodial sentence/ In a four-by-four pad” to convey just a small portion of his internal pain that fuels his songs. As well as ‘M.E.N’, the song ‘Pain’ really hits the listener hard too, where he talks of his “psychological pain” and mentions “What do you find that mad?/ What about a kid that had to find his dad, to only find out he didn’t like him back” which increases the inspiration behind Bugzy’s excellent but pained lyrics.
Bugzy is a modest artist, which makes him that bit more inspiring and he himself admits that people might not listen to his songs if he didn’t have that upbringing, but the other tracks on his EP like ‘Pagans’ and ‘Ready To Blow’ rubbish these claims by cementing his status as one of the best in the scene, and it’s safe to say that if he carries on like this then he definitely will become “grime 2015”.
This is an essential EP for any grime fan and provides a slightly different sound to the usual London or Birmingham grime tracks, so is a refreshing change despite some of the more moving subject matter.
Words by Elliott Jones