Headie One: The Last One review – rueful memoir with party tunes attached

What the stony-faced Headie One lacks in charisma – he’s no Stormzy – he makes up for in first-hand reportage: one of The Last One’s 20 tracks, Recall/Why You Look So Tired, reels off a list of prisons Headie has been incarcerated in. “Eleven jails, eleven free-flows, that’s why I look so tired,” he offers on this densely worded portrait of a life of time, studded with plenty of offhand pop references: “feelin’ like Ed [Sheeran] in the trap, had to plus, times, divide till it equalled”.

This may only be Headie’s second studio album, but it follows a slew of mixtapes and collaborations that has meant that the drill artist, raised on north London’s infamous Broadwater Farm estate, has rarely been far from contention since Edna, his emotive 2020 No 1 debut dedicated to his late mother. The Last One mixes granular, rueful memoir with party tunes and non-drill work in an effort to consolidate his brief beyond street lore. The list of guests is strong but ultimately a little distracting. Skrillex makes a serviceable, if anonymous, bounce of Make a W. The Sampha-guesting Memories, by contrast, is the most musically startling here, while Cry No More is the album’s keynote address, featuring Stormzy and a nagging helium sample hook. Throughout, pacy honesty is really Headie One’s strongest suit.