*I just wanna kick this off with a trigger warning, as we eventually get into some pretty heavy topics regarding mental health, depression, anxiety and suicide, including some of my experiences with those topics. I know they aren’t easy things to read about. They’re very important topics to myself, so I felt this to be an extremely worthwhile piece to write, but it would feel reckless to dive into a lot of that without warning. Love you all and thank you for reading.*
Tyron Frampton, better known as slowthai, hails from Northampton, England. His name is a mash up of a nickname he had when he was y0unger: “Slow” coming from his deliberate, rather slow manner of speaking, and “Thai” being a play on his name, Tyron. The product of a single mother household, Tyron was accustomed to pain and struggle throughout his early life; A major source of pain being the passing of his young brother, Michael, in 2001 after being born with Muscular Dystrophy.
After attempting to attend his local university and bouncing from job to job, he finally decided to take his music more seriously. The good thing about that is that he naturally had an ear for great production, possessed a unique, nasally cadence, and had a whole fucking lot to say. This lead to his recording of some EPs and singles, before gaining enough buzz that a debut record was in order.
That debut album was 2019’s, Nothing Great About Britain, which was a fiery, direct, and sincere critique on British politics, misguided nationalism, and the overall shittiness of British society at large. It blended rap, grime and punk music, all with slowthai’s wit, anger and eclectic performance style at the forefront. It got mostly rave reviews, featured in plenty of year end lists, and got short-listed for the Mercury Music Prize.
With a contributions on Tyler, The Creator’s Igor, appearances on Brockhampton and Gorilla tracks, as well as burgeoning relationships with heavy hitting US artists like Kenny Beats and A$AP Rocky furthering his scope and audience, there was no where to go but up.
Then on Febuary 12th of 2020, he was due to, somewhat ironically after the following events, receive the Hero of the Year Award at the NME Awards. He first shared some, let’s say, awkward and potentially discomforting sexual comments towards Canadian comedian and presenter Katherine Ryan. Then, while receiving his award, was heckled by some people in the crowd in response to those comments, culminating in Frampton jumping into the crowd to confront them after some drinks were tossed both ways. Both of those incidents together didn’t exactly paint the most positive image of someone who was winning the Hero of the Year award that night.
His next actions could have made things worse, as we see have seen time and time again with celebrities constantly botching their supposed apologies after fucking up, but instead, Tyron sent out a series of self-effacing tweets sincerely apologizing directly to Ryan and for his behavior at large. He opened himself up for his fans and detractors to criticize him. Even if Ryan herself wasn’t directly offended, given her background as a comic, he understood that a lot of people were, and he showed his true colors in his responses. He made people uncomfortable and wanted to right what he saw as a wrong. In response he was honest and very critical of himself, even going as far as to ask NME to send the award to Ryan, as he didn’t see himself as a hero.
Actions like this- Frampton making an absolute ass of himself in front of thousands, followed by his sincere apologies and willingness to interact with his own flaws in the public eye- paint a picture of Tyron Frampton. And keeping with that general idea, he took a different route on his next album. NGAB was sprawling and tackled big, unwieldy topics. But, what I can only assume, is partially in response to the inward reflection and damage control he need to partake in following his incident, he clearly recognized something important. There were issues that he needed to flesh out and address in much more detail, and most of those directly relate to himself as a human being.
The project that acted as a culmination of this is self reflection is TYRON. It is 14 track exploration that touches on heavy personal topics like his upbringing, anxiety, depression, his struggles with ADHD, suicidal thoughts, and just trying to figure out how to overcome and work through all of that shit. It is split into two parts, with the first half consisting of harder hitting, more aggressive tracks with all caps titles, followed up by a more subdued second half with the song titles being all lowercased. In doing this, he takes us on a bit of a journey into his mind and he isn’t afraid of exposing all of the nasty, complicated bits you can find there. Just as he’s never been one to run away from confrontation in general, he’s just as willing to go to war with the very conflicts that are constantly occurring within himself.
Opener, “45 SMOKE,” is an absolute tone setter for the first half of the album. Best friend and producer, Kwes Darko’s, production is dark and imposing, with the sound of a siren constantly pulsing in the background. It’s impossible to not feel energized, as the very first lines you hear on the record are declarations of, “Rise and shine let’s get it, bombaclaat dickhead, bambaclaat dickhead!” He then delves into aspects of his early life, which included jacking cars, dealing drugs in the UK equivalent of project housing, using a fake patois accent to avoid being identified doing said crimes, all resulting into him becoming “a vile little cunt from the eastern side.” By the end of the track, he is ready to declare the world as his to conquer, before slipping into a borderline unhinged vocal pattern where he compares himself to Satan’s son. Even when he’s at his most confident, he’s seemingly about to fall apart at the seams. There is always this darkness just lurking around the corner.
Then we have the fantastic “CANCELLED,” featuring the legendary Skepta. Initially, I was wary, because after most people seemingly moved on passed the NME incident, I was hoping that slowthai wasn’t going to waste time rehashing something that didn’t need more attention. He does slightly touch on it, mentioning how he’s made his comeback after being cancelled. The rest of the track addresses cancel culture in general, specifically in the way that some people seem just ready at all times to “cancel” someone for minor shit. Of course, there are a whole host of things that deserve to be met with ridicule and scorn, but the want and need to hunt out times to do so is honestly pretty tiring and counterproductive in a lot of ways. To me, there is always a line between artistry and someone strictly using hateful, disgusting rhetoric as a “joke” or “art.”
The song itself is a goddamn banger. There are some slick beat switches and plenty of loud, cacophonous bass and chimes. Skepta actually gets a lot of the track to himself, which as a huge fan and admirer, I love. It also shows a legitimate level of respect slowthai has for him as an artist, where on an album that is named after himself, he allows Skepta to shine. The video, with it’s references to Scream and American Psycho, is amazing as well.
“MAZZA,” is the most fun, relatively easy going track here, and it serves it’s purpose absolutely perfectly. The playful, cycling synth line and the surging bass bring a wonderful level of energy. Even on a track this playful, however, slowthai touches on some of these topics that will return later in the track list. He shouts out his suicidal tendencies (literally, he says “what’s up” to them), and touches on his complicated relationship with drugs. He raps, “Look how shit changed/ Feeling like these drugs made me better than I was/ But I never felt love before the drugs.”
A$AP Rocky hops on and just gives a trademark, gracefully cool and humorous verse. There’s something endlessly hilarious about him describing popping up at a party and “strolling in like an old man” because he’s off 4 xans and is probably wearing some high fashion version of the shit your grandpa where, while every woman in attendance stares at him. This one is just fun and was just made to be played on repeat, overflowing with energy and clever lines.
“VEX” is slowthai at his most confrontational and unwilling to compromise. He’s generally discussing his reactions to shit-talk and criticism he would see online. A good ol fashioned take down of some keyboard warriors; People who would be so nice and complimentary in person if they ever ran into the celebrity they were just shit talking. But, he’s started to see how exhausting and counter productive it is to get all bent out of shape over dummies like that. Now, he simply responds with a “mhm” instead of getting vexed.
He touches on other aspects of his upbringing, as he did in previous songs, delving into his drug dealing, former life where he never knew what it was like to live in a home with proper heating, and how a lot of these circumstances have lead to him to tortured at all times, even when he seems calm. He’s had to fight for everything given to him, and here, we see him admitting that at this point, the version of Tyron in this song was still ready to blame others for his own actions:
“Been bad since I stepped out the womb
In a barrel with crabs, had to make them food
Always wanted more, but I learned to make do
If my attitude’s poor, it’s because of you”
His ability to paint a vivid, unnerving picture is on full display too with these bars, which he delivers in a similar higher pitch that he employed on “45 Smoke”: “All I know’s destroy get with the program/ Crackhead smokin’ crack off of a Coke can/ Packet in your bracket, I’m the snowman/ Brother doin’ life, he’s in the snow globe/ Albo sending white, he got a boat-load.”
“WOT” comes in at under a minute, and act like a shot of adrenaline.This shit goes so ridiculously hard, and features slowthai at his most animated and over the top. There’s a part where he’s essentially yelling about how cool and calm he is, which is equal parts funny and relatable, because that’s exactly what someone would say when they are anything but cool and calm. Despite it’s short length- here is a snippet from an interview where slowthai explains exactly why this is the case, and once I found that out, I stopped internally complaining about how short it is:
“I met Pop Smoke, and that night I recorded this song. It was the night he passed. The next morning, I woke up at 6 am to go to the Disclosure video shoot [for ‘My High’] and saw the news. I was just mad overwhelmed. Initially, I’d linked up with Rocky, making another tune, but he didn’t finish his bit. [slowthai’s part] felt like it summed it up the energies—it was like [Pop Smoke’s] energy, just good vibes. I felt like I wouldn’t make it any longer because it’s straight to the point. As soon as it starts, you know that it’s on.”- slowthai
“DEAD” features some more killer production from Kwes, with him contributing the vocals to the chorus as well. This is one of the tracks that we begin to see slowthai’s mentality changing, as the self-criticism and overall introspection increasing. The sentiment of the song is a more mature one as well, as the idea that his art, his overall essence, will live on long after he’s dead. Instead of simply living in the moment, curating a legitimate legacy that has some staying power is a major goal. He’s still pretty aggressive in terms of his delivery, but it feels much more composed and less erratic than on previous tracks. Even so, he still throws out some of his hardest bars:
“We don’t take kindly to no insults
We all aim at you, plain and simple
Achoo, no bless you, I gotta get you
Take away my loved ones, you will never take the light
That shines inside my heart and makes me real by design
When it’s ugly change for money, see that they ain’t got no spine
People change for money, what’s money with no time?”
“PLAY WITH FIRE” is a masterful bridge between the two sides of the album. Instead of jarringly transitioning into the softer sonics, we’re gifted this track, which begins with Tyron declaring, in a pitch shifted voice, “I’m hypersensitive.” He then wrestles with his own masculinity, as he understands that certain things are expected of men where he comes from. So where does that leave someone like Tyron, who is constantly in his own head and intensely feels every single emotion? Even so, he brags that he’s “the best thing since electric,” coming off more confident than brash, while mixing this light-braggadocio with more vidid imagery of his struggles. Things weren’t easy for him growing up, and whether it was an accurate interpretation of his situation, he always felt as if he needed to do everything by himself. Even when he needed a helping hand, he only had his own hand to turn to: “Remember I didn’t have a flint, skint, tryna get it/ Setting fire with my lighter/ I did it ambidextrous.”
The outro of this track features overlapping, internal thoughts of his. In an interview with Anthony Fantano, he admits that a lot of these are actual tweets of his, and that he often uses them to remember lyrics. In practice, it feels like a cacophony of his darkest thoughts flowing to the forefront of his psyche. These thoughts are constantly tripping over one another, like a bunch of fighting for the latest toy on Black Friday morning. It’s an accurate representation of exactly what it can feel like when all of your self-doubts, anxieties, and dark thoughts are coming to the surface at one time. It’s overwhelming; You aren’t sure what to focus on or what to try to push to the side.
This leads into the first track of the second half, that being “i tried.” The initial vocal sample is from an artist named Trey Gruber, who passed away before really gaining recognition for his music. “I tried to die/ I tried to take my life/ I tried,” he sings, and just as a lot of Mac Miller’s music is hard to listen to knowing how is life ended, knowing the background behind the artist that was sample adds a fair bit of weight to the track overall.
The soulful instrumental and guitars give a therapeutic platform for Tyron to really open up about the things he is constantly struggling with. He’s trying to focus on the positives more, comparing himself to the footballer Ronaldo, despite being “stuck in Sunday League,” which is far from the grand stage that the best footballers play on. Even though he see’s more light in his life, it is almost impossible not to find himself falling into holes that he thought were finally covered up. The dark thoughts always return, and relapses occur, but being able to enjoy that brightness, no matter how fleeting, can be seen as progress in-and-of-itself. He sings “I’ve got a sickness/ But I’m dealing with it/ It feels like I’m sinking all of the time,” as the song loses steam and he loses some of the confidence he expressed earlier in the track.
On the Kenny Beats aided “focus,” slowthai takes that sentiment a bit further. He continues to realize, and is beginning to act on the things that he hopes will help keep him safe from that overarching darkness that is always lingering in his mind. He raps, “slow dance with the devil, no chance so I settle/ No second chance, I just gotta be better/ Lesser version of myself, shoe fits Cinderella.” He isn’t just realizing how tough things have been, but coming to terms with the fact that now he’s moved on from his youth. He no longer needs to scratch and claw for the most basic things, constantly putting him in danger: “Life never precious and I always had a death wish/ And I never had a breath of fresh air, I need a breath mint,” he raps, ready to continue his personal evolution.
“terms” feature’s a killer chorus from Dominic Fike, and some down-tuned vocals from Denzel Curry. Yeah, I’m a little salty we didn’t get a full verse from Denzel, but what are you gonna do? Overall, this is another track where Tyron is realizing that constantly getting caught up in what people are saying about him, especially now that he has people paying attention to everything he does. Instead, he makes the conscious decision to continue to be true to himself and act as such. Even though some people see him in a poor light, he likens them to sheep, and he’s no Shepard, so they can fuck right off. And yet, as he has demonstrated before, it is still so difficult not to get stuck in a negative rut; To find yourself back where you started. Paying less attention to words from people who don’t matter is one thing, but that doesn’t mean that all of the thoughts inside of your own head will stop plaguing you. Even then, those thoughts and the pain they cause sometimes act as the very things that help you feel alive. He illustrates this beautifully here:
“Smokin’ my troubles away
My early grave, don’t resuscitate
Early bird wakes
Catches the worm then reverts to its base, regurgitates
And nothing I’ll change
Do it again and I do it the same again and again
If I numb the pain, outing the flame
Add fuel to the blaze, what’s joy without pain?”
“push” features some beautiful vocals from Deb Never, who, as one of Tyron’s friends, appears to actually be a pretty big influence on this track at large. It’s propelled by a gorgeous, tender guitar line. The first verse sees Tyron recalling a lot of his faults, and his tendencies to make an ass out of himself. But moving past these negatives, he begins to see the value in relationships, and how amazing it is to have people around you who really, truly fucking care about you. “When push comes to shove/ You gotta push,” he instructs, clearly parroting what someone said to him in the past.
He likens himself to a lucky cat who always lands on his feet, but understands that other people can help you out and make sure you aren’t in a position where you’re falling to begin with. You can’t do everything by yourself, no matter how hard you try. Asking for a little help doesn’t make you weak or lesser. There is nothing more heartening than knowing you have someone close to you who wants nothing more than to shut those negative voices in your head up and help you move forward. By the end of the track, he drops all pretenses or hints of the bravado he’s previously expressed throughout the album, realizing how much he really needs another person to help hold him up:
“I fall on my knees with my hands to God
Bite the hand that feeds you
If I said I loved you, I would never leave you
If I said I loved you, it’s because I need you
Call you pancake like I need my treacle” (treacle is a thick syrup)
After Tyron finally witnessed wonderful people show how much they care about him and his happiness, he takes it upon himself to express that sentiment right back to others on “nhs,” with the title being a reference to the healthcare workers that have worked their asses off during the pandemic. He spins this classic, shitty piece of advice: “Why don’t you just be happy? Just stop being depressed.” Instead, he makes a point to normalize these feelings, instead of minimizing them. Everything relies on something else in some way. Guns need bullets. Mansions need rooms. Dinner needs food. It sounds kind of silly, but that’s the point. Without a basic, obvious attribute or item, countless things simply wouldn’t exist. Everyone needs help and other people in their lives. He’s just trying to give us a little reassurance.
Just as you often need multiple components to create a whole, a lot of good things constantly come with bad things as well. Planes are amazing because you can travel almost everywhere. But you’ll often experience the stress of turbulence. My favorite example is this one though: “[What’s] A club with no cunts who laugh at people tryna have a laugh?” Even if you’re enjoying yourself and not harming anyone, there’s still some asshole that might laugh or make some assholish comment. But when you start to expect these things, you can prepare for them and pivot to the positive more swiftly. By the end of the track, he makes it clear that there is no shame in feeling what you feel. He also gives us one of the more beautiful, yet simple sentiments on the entire album: “All the best shit’s got scratches on the surface.”
“Feel Away” has some beautiful vocals provided by James Blake and also features Mount Kimbie. Over a downright cute, catchy piano driven beat, Tyron tells a story of a relationship in which he feels like he has done just about everything he can for a women, even going as far as to agree to have a child with here, despite his own personal reservations with the idea. We then get the chorus, Tyron sings, “Suddenly not half the man I used to be/ Truthfully, ain’t half the bitch you could’ve been/ It’s not you so I guess it’s me.”
Just like a lot of the feelings on Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm, this feels like a really accurate representation of those immediate, nasty reactions after you’ve gotten out of a relationship. And yet, we see that more mature outlook from Tyron, where he bounces back and forth between realizing maybe he dropped the ball, goes on to blame the woman, but then instantly catches himself as if he realizes that isn’t fair to completely blame him, because his interpretation of how the relationship went is more than likely biased.
The video is pretty damn wild, but Tyron had some great things to say about what it really all stands for:
“But it’s about putting yourself in your partner’s shoes, because through experiences, be it from my mum or friends, I’ve learnt that in a lot of relationships, when a woman’s pregnant, the man tends to leave the woman. The woman usually is all alone to deal with all these problems. I wanted it to be the other way around—the woman leaves the man. He’s got to go through all that pain to get to the better side, the beauty of it.” – slowthai
Again, instead of just dwelling and getting caught up in the undertow of negativity, he has realized that there is always a positive lesson to take away. Every bad interaction or failed relationship is an opportunity to grow and learn.
After the confrontational, somewhat more emotional bleak first half, it feels like Tyron has begun to turn a corner. He has people in his life who care and help dig him out of his own early grave. He’s learned how to do his best to be that kind of person for others. As he said just a few tracks ago, all of that is amazing and should be celebrated. But just as he has also stressed, that does not necessarily mean the anxiety, depression and darkness is gone for good.
The album ends with the absolute gut punch that is “adhd.” The track focuses painfully directly on Tyron’s struggle with adhd while the thoughts of anxiety, depression and suicide swirl around in his mind simultaneously. Every single thing about this this song is eminently relatable to me and ends up acting as the most accurate and heartbreaking representation of how terrifying dealing with mental illness really is. I know this piece is already long as fuck, so apologies if I spend even more time on this particular track than the previous ones. This one means a lot and really hits me every time I listen to it.
The first verse verse Tyron touches on just about every aspect depression he can. He’s alone and slipping farther and farther into a hole. He describes what this feels like to T here: Tryna protect so I project/ Deflect and they call it self-defence/Feel the pressure and we all got our reasons/ Smile on the out, but inside I keep bleedin’.
He goes on to question whether his friends would actually be there for him like they claimed they would. He can’t trust himself, and he isn’t sure if he can trust anyone around him. By the time he gets to the chorus, he flatly sings about how he’s surrounded by sad songs and his sickness. He’s always been followed by a “passenger,” that being his depression and adhd. He eventually comes to the conclusion: “Goodbye, my only decision.” That could be seen as him finally being so overwhelmed that suicide appears to be the only option. Or, because he’s been steered in different directions by his illnesses without much of a say, he thinks he can finally take charge by taking his own life. Either way, it’s fucking heartbreaking.
Tying into the video, the second verse continues to list out the negative thoughts that consume Tyron’s head as he paces back and forth, sit down, stand up, obviously unable to find any sense of comfort. He smokes too much weed and drinks too much in a hope to stop the overthinking. Internally, he rationalizes the overthinking as such:
“Slave to the progress
I obsess ’cause I ain’t got control yet
I’m tryna fly but my wings feel broken
An eagle encaged in a closure”
Just because he’s coping by self medicating, that doesn’t mean he’s not trying. In fact, he’s trying so hard and thinking about these issues so much because he wants nothing more than to finally see some progress. Despite all of the positive take aways from earlier tracks, there are times when you are so down, so cataclysmically depressed, that anything you do feels pointless, and all of that previous positivity is overshadowed. By the end of the verse, he’s just begging someone to pick up the phone because he knows what might happen if he’s left alone with his own thoughts for too long. In fact, that’s partially why he’s the one who always picks up the phone as well.
Just as the chorus begins again, he gets to the line where he is ready to say goodbye, but it is instead interrupted by phone dial tone. Tyron calls up one of his friends to let them know how much they mean to him, and that he loves them. This could be interpreted as that potentially life saving call he received right before he nearly succumbed to his darkest urges. It also feels like a shoutout to the friends he has mentioned many times that are currently incarcerated, and he clearly misses his friends dearly. In both cases, it’s a short skit that just ups the overall emotional weight up the track so far.
After that call, we get a short verse that absolutely explodes out of nowhere. Just as with adhd, or someone who experiences mania and depression, or bipolar disorder, there is always kind of release. Eventually, overwhelming amount of energy builds up and there is never a clear way how to deal with it. Tyron releases this energy by rapping, well, screaming:
“You can’t be my friend, living and I’m dead
Caught in Charlotte’s Web, I can’t feel myself
Mind complexity be the death of me
Heavy weaponry at my melon, squeezed
I got tendencies, psycho tendencies
Touch me tenderly, Heaven, let me in”
I get goosebumps every single time it gets to this point of the track. He goes from declaring that he wasn’t made for Heaven on “i tried,” to begging to be let into Heaven at his absolute lowest, having seemingly just taken his own life, knowing that in the wonderful Christian tradition, suicide means a place in Hell.
But, the verse doesn’t end there:
“I think you got amnesia
And this stress soon to give me alopecia
And I’m vexed tryna smile like Mona Lisa
Fail to exit like I ain’t got a visa”
It would appear that he actually didn’t end up following through with the attempt on his life. It was all in his head. But he simultaneously acknowledges that the stress will build again, likely sending him back into a similar mental state. It’s all a cycle. He even ends on a bit of dark humor, in which he compares not having a visa to either having failed to follow through on taking his own life, or having failed to get out of the web of depression. There is even a little pucker of a kiss, as if something sweet brought him out of this manic state, but it’s easy to assume that wasn’t the one kiss that finally pushed him passed all of these struggles for good.
It’s that last section of the verse that resonated with me the most. I can absolutely relate, especially in the way it’s depicted in the video, to so much of what Tyron his talking about. I have lost track of how many times I’ve sat there, in my own head, in a full blown anxiety attack, trying to not only fight off all of the thoughts racing in my head, but the vomit and nausea that would instantly let everyone around me know that I wasn’t okay. He isn’t rapping in the video, it is all an internal thought process.
Sometimes, you aren’t able to fight off that anxiety or depressive episode, and once you’re in it, man, you’re fucking in it. The rocking back and forth, contorted face, all accompanied by the screaming and thoughts of suicide. As someone who can admit to have had suicidal-adjacent thoughts, this all just hits me right in the chest every single time.
While there are times I hear the track and kind of get transported back to some of those darker times times, which really just drives home the point of how difficult it is to escape those memories and feelings, more often than not I feel something quite different. Even if it’s made me cry multiple times, I feel validated. I know I’m not the only one that struggles in this way or has found themselves in such a place that they’ve begun to tip-toe around thoughts of suicide. Hell, I personally know people who have been in the exact same place. And yet, it’s almost an odd sense of relief, that someone is able to articulate these feelings so much better than yourself.
In the end, that is what I love about this album so much. It’s extremely self-biographical. It’s fucking called TYRON. But still, I think it is highly relatable for myself and anyone who’s felt any of these feelings themselves. There are two rather distinct sides to the album, but when you think about it, the line in the sand is much less straight than the punctuation of the titles may suggest. Even on the hardest tracks, he’ll mention his thoughts of suicide and how hard things can get. Even at his most happy and positive, he has to always acknowledge the cloud hanging over him. And in reality, I can’t think of a more accurate representation of what struggling with mental illness is like. That’s what this album means to me. So, thank you, Tyron. Thank you for being so vulnerable and for putting together such an amazing work of art.