Dialling into our call under the name ‘iPhone John’, John Glacier is coy at first, shadowy as she was onstage at Corsica Studios last year on a bill next to Dean Blunt, Klein and Vegyn, her regular producer. She often seems immersed in her own atmosphere in live situations like these: eyes closed, head down, mic held close, enveloped in a crouch. It doesn’t take long for the ice to break, and ten minutes into our conversation iPhone John loosens into the Glacier we hear on record, whose bars stitch and twist over mutant boom-bap.
The heat of Glacier’s debut LP spread like the best kind of gossip when it dropped in July. Just like the London-born rapper’s biography, it’s an album caught somewhere in the ether, between the hard realities of the city and the listlessness of the tropics. For three or four years before its release, those who knew would catch glimpses of Glacier via ephemeral feature appearances or live cameos with the likes of Shygirl, Babyfather and Jeshi. But for those who didn’t, the came like a bolt out of nowhere.
