Taken from the summer 2023 issue of Dazed. You may buy a replica of our latest issue here.

It would take Digga D about 20 minutes, give or take, to warm as much as me. “Don’t take it personally,” says his publicist, remarking that he’s, typically, a person of few words – though being clever and nasty and evocative with them is how he made a reputation, how his bread is buttered. After we first speak he’s in Trinidad, where the weather is so unrelentingly hot that, even within the shade of a sapodilla, the energy expended by an extended conversation could make you are feeling light-headed. And so he’s curt. (“It makes me money,” he says of his motivations.) He’s evasive. (“When it began making me money,” of when he realised he was good.) He’s brushing his shoulder-length twists from his face and moving from the porch to a room inside, then shifting to a different, equally airless room, looking for a comfort that’s prone to elude him. He’s answering my questions vaguely, or with a handful of words, after which punctuating his responses with, “You get me?” Often, I don’t.

Throughout our first conversation, it appears as if he’d relatively be dozing on a hammock beneath the Caribbean sun, which seems the apparent selection over chatting with a stranger with a notepad who’s asking you to take stock of your life. Nostalgia doesn’t come easily for those shackled to their worst mistakes. And so it’s unsurprising when the software that transcribes our conversation tells me afterwards that I’ve in some way done 60 per cent of the talking, despite being the appointed reporter within the situation. For a moment in the beginning of our interview, it feels as if we’ve traded roles. Digga is asking the questions. He desires to know what I’m planning to jot down. He desires to know if I mean to speak concerning the music he’s been making, or if I mean to clear the air (which has for years been thick with tabloid panic). If a side-eye could speak, it will be Digga D saying, “Which one is it?” His lawyer of 5 years tells me he’s distrustful of journalists. His publicist tells me 90% of the interviews he does are with uniformed men who need to recall him to prison. Men who imagine his music must be targeted with terrorism laws. Men who shall be reading this profile for reasons besides entertainment.

At 22 years old, Digga D, born Rhys Herbert, is already considered one of the brightest stars within the UK music scene. He’s released three mixtapes in as a few years, and his latest offering, Noughty By Nature, debuted at primary on the album charts last yr. He’s won plaques for several singles on the Top 40, and accrues thousands and thousands of views on the music videos he posts to YouTube – that’s, those that haven’t been scrubbed from the location by Project Alpha, an ‘intelligence-gathering initiative’ funded by the Home Office. He’s signed to a record label that he founded himself, called Black Money Records, which he says he formed in response to “an industry renowned for exploiting artists from my world”. And he’s made fans within the likes of Drake, Stormzy, the late Pop Smoke and… Zac Efron. Nowadays, it’s hard to speak concerning the crowded latest vanguard of drill music, about K-Trap and Headie One and Unknown T, without also, ultimately, talking about Digga D.

Music critics are likely to jubilantly credit him as a pioneer of drill, and he stands aside from his class in lyrical ability. Digga’s flow, like his personality, is alternately brazen and truculent, laidback and unflinching. His imagery is clever. Even prolonged, naturalistic musings on the brutality of street life are occasionally pierced by cheerful ad-libs (glee! woi! bluuwuu!), in order that stories of innocence disturbed and forfeited, lives taken and lost, are punctured by the reminder of our witness’s youth, and that he’s maintained his sense of humour despite the whole lot he’s seen. There was a time when he seemed relatively proud to be included within the pantheon of drill luminaries, when he would say things to interviewers like, “Other people made drill, I just took it to a spot it’s never been before.” But Digga has progressively adopted a reluctant stance towards the genre upon which he built his riches and his fame. It’s an ambivalence that extends beyond the classic, cliched contempt for one’s vintage material, a defiant wariness that coalesces on a bunch of latest tracks he plays me. “I don’t like drill no more, it’s drained / Can’t bear man liars / If you happen to lot saw my priors / You’d call me Michael Myers,” he raps coolly on one, over what appears like a warbled sitar. Incidentally, it’s considered one of the few drill songs he’s been working on currently, and Digga laughs mischievously after I bring it up, clearly amused, in an almost childlike way, by the minor insolence involved in his own winking dismissal. “I’m not someone that likes to follow fashions,” he says, shrugging. “It doesn’t mean I’m rebellious, or I prefer to break rules. It just signifies that if I see too many individuals doing one thing, I am going the alternative way.”

Digga’s latest music features some more adventurous beat selection than a few of his past projects have, however the adherence to a more classic strain of 2000s hip hop goes deeper than a love for the American greats, or the easy fact of maturation.“I don’t feel like I’ve outgrown drill, necessarily,” he says. “I don’t think that drill is something that will be outgrown, because there are people who find themselves, like, 30 years old making drill songs, individuals who still have something to say. I may be a bit frustrated with drill, though, because people” – and here he’s talking about people without craft, individuals who coast on gimmick – “have taken the genre and made it right into a comedy. It’s like boxing,” he says. “With the fake fights and stuff – it’s taking away from what boxing actually is. You’ve to be talented to fight. Now, persons are arguing online, training for 2 weeks, after which getting within the boxing ring and calling it boxing. It’s, nevertheless it’s not.”

Besides comedy, the previous couple of years have seen the genre abstracted right into a reason for mass hysteria, into political roundtables and courtroom evidence, into amoral contagion and “the soundtrack for London’s murders”. Drill has come to represent a number of pearl-clutching fears, as all global Black music eventually does. And since it often archives the bleakness and deprivation of the inner-city life that birthed it – where greater than a decade of presidency austerity measures have decimated social services and hiked up knife crime amongst youth – drill has inevitably been blamed for inciting the violence it strains to record. “It’s essentially discussed as a front for criminal gangs, indeed because the embodiment of criminality,” says Dr Lambros Fatsis, a senior lecturer on the University of Brighton who researches Black music subcultures and acts as an authority witness in court cases involving using rap as evidence. “We discuss drill as a source of concern, as what I describe as being aesthetically out of tune, culturally misplaced, and politically out of order.” It’s a conversation that has, throughout history, plagiarised its own more annoying, ahistorical conclusions concerning the relationship between culture and violence, a philosophical ouroboros of conservative fear. The horse is long-dead but not quite buried: is the brutality native to some factions of rap music proof of art imitating life, or is it the opposite way around?

“There’s numerous things which might be violent: rock music, GTA, Kill Bill, Anne Frank’s diary – we don’t ban those,” says Digga. “However the younger generation made drill global, and it’s Black-owned. It’s not fair to say that we’re causing violence. We’re just talking about our lives. There may be some violence in there. But that’s what we grew up on.”

Still, nearly 20 years after Lethal Bizzle’s “Pow!” was banned from radio airwaves and the club circuit alike, Digga D and his cohort have turn into the metaphorical battleground upon which this war is being fought. In 2018, when he was 18, Digga was sentenced to a yr in prison for conspiracy to commit violent disorder. The police stopped him and his friends, with whom he made music because the drill group 1011, and located them carrying 4 knives and two baseball bats. They claimed they were on their technique to film a music video; the police said they were on their technique to attack a rival gang. They pled guilty in court, where prosecutors submitted their music videos as evidence. In English courtrooms, drill is taken into account ‘gang-related music’, and so heads of gang units and cosplaying music critics are called upon to translate and interpret lyrics for everybody else. (Every thing is taken literally, and the implication is that rappers lack fictional imagination.) The Met applied to have the group banned from making music that “references violence”, and, in what was reported as an unprecedented decision, the judge granted it.

“It’s upsetting, because without Harrow Club, I wouldn’t be who I’m. You never know what probabilities they’re taking away from these kids”

Digga became considered one of the primary artists to be assigned a criminal behaviour order that limits who he associates with, where he goes and what he says in his music. He has to show in his lyric sheets to the police 24 hours before releasing any music. There are songs he can not perform. The order is complex and extensive and, if he breaches its conditions, he will be recalled to jail. This happened 3 times before he turned 20. It’s considered one of the important reasons, I later learn, that he’s so laconic in our first conversation: his lawyer shouldn’t be present to counsel him on which parts of his own history he’s legally allowed to debate. Until 2025, when the order expires, his adolescence is taken into account too violent to rap about. And he has to mind what he says in his interviews. In this fashion his life doesn’t totally belong to him. His songs are riddled with imposed silences.

He’s far more comfy the subsequent time we speak, every week after our first conversation. His lawyer, Cecilia Goodwin, is on the decision with us, as is his publicist, Rachel, and so the uncertainty that when marred his candour has been replaced, at the very least partially, with affability and charm. There’s a stillness about him, too, that feels more solid this time around, a sort of serenity one may expect from someone far older than he’s. I get the sense that this mode of being is way more natural to him. “I’m back in London,” he says. I’m sitting, once more, in front of a laptop screen, and Digga is seated at a table on what may be a bistro patio, asking, with a politeness harking back to a toddler in search of permission, “Is it OK if I eat on this?” He scarfs down a handful of fries and sips at his drink. When his speech becomes muffled and he identifies the foundation of the issue, which is that his braids are covering the mic on his AirPods, he says, “Wowwwww.” Someone says, “That’s discrimination.” Everyone laughs.

Digga doesn’t strike me as someone who’s in any respect sentimental, but he’s more willing now to speak concerning the past. Despite the cash and the well-worn passport, he says he hasn’t felt free since he was a toddler. Back then, things were simpler. He didn’t have any responsibilities, except going to church together with his mother on Sundays. (He doesn’t go to any more, since it doesn’t feel comfortable or welcoming to him, but his mother still sends him YouTube streams of services every weekend, which he admits to watching “sometimes”.) Back then, he had nothing to avoid or worry about. He was born in Ladbroke Grove but has also lived in nearby Harrow Road and Notting Hill where, within the summers, he could see the Carnival on the street from his window. The riddims and the din of celebration would spill into his home. His parents are each West Indian, from Jamaica and Barbados, and so they used to take him all the way down to the soundsystems that blared reggae into the crowded streets, where the bass bore itself into his body. Reggae and dancehall were a few of his earliest experiences with music. He’s quick to notice the extent to which Jamaica has influenced British culture writ-large, “even all the way down to the language. You’ve Albanians talking about going to their yaad, and the entire country saying wagwan without knowing where they got it from.” If he ever selected to maneuver out of London, he is bound he would go either to the Caribbean – perhaps to Jamaica – or Miami.

But for now he’s in London, sifting through his memories. “I began going to Harrow Club after I was, like, 12,” he says, recalling days spent playing football on the youth club. It was a church, and so the constructing has soaring ceilings with exposed beams and ornate period windows that look out towards Latimer Road. The club was formed in 1883 as a charity called the Harrow Mission, in response to the needs of what first Missioner William Law described as a “forlorn, neglected and desolate” area. Today, reports have identified high levels of post-traumatic stress disorder amongst individuals who live locally, and life expectancy, in accordance with the club website, is 12 years longer within the richest ward of Kensington and Chelsea than it’s within the poorest. “That point moulded me into who I’m today,” Digga continues. “The sports hall upstairs, the studio downstairs. The music workshops. They used to take us on day trips – paintballing, stuff like that. Plenty of different activities. I’m an only child. I couldn’t go home and play PlayStation with my brothers. I didn’t have that. In order that’s where I might go.”

Ladbroke Grove is a visit, a trompe l’oeil. It wears its stratification like a jacket. The realm has a historical status for poverty and decay, but there are million-pound Victorian townhouses slotted next to crowded council flats, the fallout, some say, of a development blacklisting that followed the riots of 1958. In 2017, Grenfell Tower, a housing project metres away from Harrow Club, caught fire and burned for 60 hours, killing 72 people. Residents had been raising concerns about fire safety for years. The realm has the very best rate of everlasting exclusion in all of London, and 1 / 4 of the youngsters who live there are below the poverty line. Among the costliest homes in the town are there, grand white stucco houses with terraces that overlook sprawling, bucolic gardens. “You’ll see a matte-black Bentley driving past someone who’s on the side of the road struggling, attempting to steal the smallest thing,” says Digga. “After which expensive five-star restaurants.” Ladbroke Grove has a status, too, as a haven for artists, musicians and different kinds of misfits. Eric Clapton formed Cream while he was living there within the 60s. And Jimi Hendrix died of an overdose on the Samarkand Hotel, a 15-minute walk from the studio where Digga began recording songs.

It was within the mid-2010s that he and his friends began messing around with music after school on the youth club. It started off as a joke, as many things that turn into quite serious do. They were just passing the time, rapping over drill beats. They began uploading their songs to SoundCloud as 1011. When he was 14, Digga’s grandmother, with whom he was living on the time, died, and shortly after he was expelled from school for selling weed. “And that’s where all of that faculty stuff stopped,” he raps on the intro to Noughty by Nature. Black Caribbean students in English schools are as much as six times more prone to be excluded than their white peers, and that exclusion has been cited as a cause for the overrepresentation of Black youth in street crime. Like many kids who were dealt the cards that he was, Digga slipped right into a life suffused with violence and run-ins with the police.

“The individuals who know me would say I’m kind, good-hearted. But the remaining of the world is telling me I’m bad… Sometimes I don’t know find out how to feel”

He also began realising that he was good at music, and that he had loads to discuss. Digga was developing his rap voice amid a decade of presidency austerity that entrenched high levels of poverty, cut £30bn in welfare payments, housing subsidies and social services, and decimated one third of youth clubs, leaving many kids like him adrift within the streets with few social supports to maintain them heading in the right direction. And so the stories he told, made up at first after which perhaps observed, were a mirrored image of entropy initiated not by drill music, but by government policy and inaction. He borrowed haunting, ominous piano beats from a nihilistic genre of music that originated in Chicago’s South Side, where kids like Chief Keef adapted trap music to convey their disaffection with and alienation from the inner city. And he told brutal stories on top of them. It’s only through music, and Harrow Club, that he was in a position to lift himself out of a hostile and claustrophobic environment.

With reference to London’s youth club crisis, Digga is very passionate. “It’s upsetting, because without Harrow Club I wouldn’t be who I’m,” he says. “And if it ever closed… I mean, you never know what sort of probabilities they’re taking away from these kids. Back then, people wouldn’t have checked out me at Harrow Club and thought, ‘Rhys, this little kid here, he’s gonna go primary, he’s gonna achieve success, he’ll have all these followers, he’s gonna make a lot money’. No person would have believed that about me back then, because I used to be a troublemaker. So for the youngsters who’re there now, I don’t know. It’s really hard to search out the words. You recognize what I’m saying?”

I ask him what his proudest moment yet is, predicting that he might cite his community giveback to Harrow Club in 2021, when he bought and distributed piles of garments and shoes to local youth, or the moment in 2017 that his “Next Up?” freestyle went viral, and he began making extra money than he’d ever seen. As a substitute, he says it was the 2020 release of Defending Digga D, an intimate, Bafta-winning documentary that examines the legal tangle around his music and his struggle to show a latest leaf after spending 15 months in prison. Within the film he comes off as charismatic and determined, and doesn’t shrink back from accepting responsibility for his past mistakes. But there are damning scenes that reveal the ways in which his efforts are stymied, as when he’s threatened with a recall to prison for attending a Black Lives Matter rally.

“The documentary finally showed a side of me that’s real life,” he said. “With celebrities, or anyone in the general public eye, people see social media, they read headlines and, behind their minds they add all of those little things together and so they make a personality about you. However it’s of their heads. It’s not real. It would literally be the alternative of you. And I feel like I see that taking place. I like proving people flawed.” Digga’s aspirations to work across mediums and disciplines are pushing the bounds of what’s possible for a drill star. His desire to inform stories isn’t cordoned off by music. For the time being he’s acting in a few upcoming projects, and has been toying with the concept of writing his own TV show. “I don’t know what I might call it,” he says, “nevertheless it can be far more realistic and appealing to people like me than Top Boy.” He’s already proven himself to be a keen observer of street life. Now he wants to indicate all of the ways in which he can render it.

In 2020, British filmmaker Steve McQueen released an anthology series called Small Axe, a collection of 5 movies that gracefully mapped various types of brutality faced by London’s West Indian community from the late 60s into the early 80s. The opening film, Mangrove, took its name from a Caribbean restaurant in Notting Hill called the Mangrove, a typical meeting place for Black intellectuals, artists and musicians back then. They played reggae music. People – Bob Marley, Nina Simone, Diana Ross, Jimi Hendrix – went to bop. They ate home-cooked food. The police raided it 12 times from January 1969 until the next summer; in a single scene of the film, a constable accuses the restaurant owner of hosting gamblers, prostitutes and drug dealers. The protest that broke out in August 1970 resulted within the arrest of nine Black activists, who were charged with riot and affray. Their trial, which lasted 55 days, resulted in the primary judicial acknowledgement of racism within the Metropolitan police force.

“After we discuss how Black music has been criminalised in the UK, we’ve got to trace it to migration patterns from the Caribbean,” says Dr Lambros Fatsis. The story and fate of the Mangrove usually are not sealed right into a vacuum. There was a time when fear of slave rebel led to the banning of drums in British colonies. The beat remains to be dangerous. When the primary soundsystems emerged within the Nineteen Sixties with the birth of ska music – which eventually produced reggae – police began targeting and raiding Black clubs, centres and meeting places. “The logic that justified the targeting of reggae within the UK was primarily that it held a threatening political message, which was an anticolonial message of liberation,” says Fatsis. Rastafarians, specifically, were viewed as culturally threatening, and reggae got here to be understood as a soundtrack to drug-dealing.

When grime music exploded within the early 2000s, a jagged mutation of UK garage and dance music, it arrived as a glitchy, street-level narration of presidency neglect. By 2005 the London Met had developed Form 696, a risk-assessment form that required nightclub promoters to present details about their events when applying for licences, including the genre of music they were playing and the ethnicity of its audience. Venues hosting nights with R&B, bashment, garage and dirt music often found their licences denied, or their parties shut down. “The police would sometimes have club owners hold the artists’ passports in the event that they were performing, essentially treating them as suspects,” says Fatsis.

An alarming precedent has already been set. Internationally, many artists who make hip-hop music are quite literally treated as suspects. The last couple of years have seen several high-profile cases through which American rappers face criminal charges for things they’ve said of their music. Young Thug is within the midst of a 56-count grand jury indictment that lists YSL Records, the label he founded, as a gang, and their lyrics have been used as an instance criminal conspiracy. Drakeo the Ruler spent three years fighting murder charges before he was found not guilty, after prosecutors used his lyrics to ascertain motive for a rap beef in 2016. Last yr, dozens of top-billing artists, record labels and streaming services signed an open letter called “Art on Trial: Protect Black Art”, which addressed each the elemental need for an outlet of free expression and the incontrovertible fact that rap music, like every other genre, shouldn’t be inherently autobiographical. “No other fictionalised form, musical or otherwise, is treated this fashion in court,” write Erik Nielsen and David Dennis Jr, authors of 2019’s Rap on Trial: Race, Lyrics, and Guilt in America. “That’s why we call this book Rap on Trial. It’s not art on trial. It’s not music on trial. It’s only rap.”

Form 696 was officially scrapped in 2017, but its aftermath is visible in using criminal behaviour orders to limit the musical expression of drill artists. Dr Anthony Gunter, a youth worker-academic who studies and writes on youth violence, notes the irony in how the federal government is concurrently announcing latest rounds of spending cuts on social programmes while also clamping down on crime. “What I’ll say about Digga D, and others like him in drill, is that at the very least they’ve a technique to express these events and these feelings. And yet, the authorities need to silence that,” says Gunter, who spent a few years working in youth clubs. “Who would we be taking a look at if Digga D didn’t have this avenue? That’s what persons are missing. Clearly, he’s an intelligent, articulate man who was in a position to create this space for himself to explore the emotions, dualities and challenges of his life. If he didn’t have that, what would we be taking a look at?”

“With celebrities, or anyone in the general public eye, people see social media, they read headlines and, behind their minds they add all of those little things together and so they make a personality about you”

Perhaps because he was a ‘criminal’ before he became a fully-grown person, and since his whole system of morality was tried in court and in British media headlines while he was still a wayward teenager, Digga D’s sense of self appears to have been warped by what others have said and written about him, seen or not seen in him. He has turn into a surface for the fearful projections of people that have never met him. On this subject he is typically self-effacing, or susceptible to small displays of casual bravado. After I ask him concerning the distance between the image of Digga D in the general public imagination and the real-life Rhys Herbert at home in private, for instance, he says that folks are entitled to their very own opinions about him, and that he’s probably not out to vary anyone’s mind. “If you happen to don’t need to look into who I’m, then I don’t care what you think that,” he says, dismissing the subject.

Within the music is one other answer. On much of his latest music, Digga D remains to be gritty and fearless as ever, but he’s also sage and surprisingly vulnerable, attuned to his emotions with a newfound maturity that disqualifies his self-diagnosis as “not superb at talking about my emotions”. The brand new tracks are rife with humour, playfulness and machismo, but there are moments of stillness where his trademark confidence takes a back seat to self-doubt. Some lines burn with the intimacy of diary entries, as if the beat were a call for a therapy session. The pitched-down vocals on one latest cut, for instance, sound as in the event that they’re coming from somewhere deep beneath the ocean, and when the soulful piano melody wanders on to the track, Digga delivers his first lines calmly:

“God gave me life so I can’t tell him I’m suicidal / It’s been rewritten / But I still find time to read the Bible / I’m a rapper, that’s my title / Someone’s idol / So I’m mindful after I talk.”

A warm, chipmunked-up soul sample lends one other track a sunny feel, however the second verse displays a self-reflexive lyrical clarity that breaks from the summery, feelgood atmosphere:

“Who knows if God still fucks with me / The entire fuckery, a few of it troubles me / The entire things that I’m going through currently / I just need someone to indicate love and cuddle me.”

And in one other track he plays me, there’s a preoccupation with the results of young kids looking as much as him while he’s “preaching all this fuckery”, preceded by an remark that “while you’re the bad energy there’s no point burning sage”. It’s this constant push and pull between past and present, between images of a carefree childhood and scenes of a turbulent adolescence, that animate the strain at the foundation of this latest music. These are dispatches from the psyche of a young man conflicted about his own goodness. He’s fearful about, and fighting for, his own soul. It’s not a totally latest theme, necessarily – for rap music, or for him. The schoolyard playground he evokes on “Stick within the Mud”, a standout from Noughty by Nature, is a setting where rounds of hide-and-seek end fatally, and where getting caught in a game of tag means the fun is de facto over. Even the mixtape’s cover depicts what the rapper calls “the evolution of badness”, a Darwinian progression from him playing around with toys product of plastic to playing around with weapons product of steel, from smoking weed and getting in trouble to picking up the mic and vying for a fresh start.

As for what he’d have to feel successful, Digga doesn’t hesitate to make an inventory: health, wealth, family, peace. He hangs on this final point, considers it. Despite the success he has garnered, he feels nowhere near finding peace. “I all the time take into consideration my history, and whether it makes me a foul person,” he tells me later. “There’s this picture that the industry has painted of me, and it’s bad. But then the individuals who actually know me would say that I’m good-hearted, that I’m kind, that I’m innocent. After which everyone else on the planet is telling me that I’m bad. And it’s like, what does that mean? Am I a very good person? Am I a foul person? It’s confusing. Sometimes I don’t know find out how to feel. I don’t think I’m attempting to answer the query, because I can’t answer a matter I don’t have the reply to. I believe I’m just asking myself who I’m.”

Hair and make-up KARLA Q LEON at SAINT LUKE using TATCHA, grooming HB, model MARGAUX DOWLAND, set design JAMES HAMILTON, prop buyer HANNAH WHITE, model maker FELIX WENTWORTH, photographic assistants MICHAEL HANI, MESHACH FALCONER- ROBERTS, JED BARNES, styling assistants ROZ MOXON, NADIA DAHAN, make-up assistants CHERYL BASKO, CATHERINE MUNOZ, ANA TORRES ASPRILLA, production THEO HUE WILLIAMS, production assistants ALEXANDRA DELL’ANNO, KELLAND THOMAS-SMITH 213