The Streets

The era-defining British rap artist Mike Skinner makes his Dubai debut with his band (also called The Streets). He’s been quiet for a while, mostly DJing and working on a film that he largely wrote and directed himself (The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light, released in 2023 with an album of the same name). But now it looks like he’s getting back to what he does best: there may be some of the hits from Original Pirate Material and A Grand Don’t Come for Free from the early 2000s, but he’s been talking about moving on – “I know people like Liam [Gallagher] and Dizzee [Rascal] have done the anniversary thing, but I don’t really need the money and I think for your own sanity you have to at least pretend that you’re doing things that are important right now …” – and we’re expecting new material. The Darker the Shadow album is full of smooth grooves and wryly observed lyrical passages, inventive as ever and based around his signature storytelling; his latest, released in June, is a compilation for fabric titled fabric presents The Streets (“I’ve spent many nights wasted but not wasted any nights in fabric over the years”) that includes four new tracks credited to The Streets and another three as Mike Skinner.