Nowadays, you're likely to find K-Trap in the ring. Not necessarily out of some grand aspiration to moonlight as a champion boxer, but out of an appreciation for the sport's physical demands. To stick to a routine, to be nimble and light on your feet, but hardened enough to take a punch or two. At his first sparring session, it took all of 10 seconds for him to get knocked squarely in the face, and it wasn't until he felt drops of liquid on his cheek that he realised the blow had triggered a nosebleed. “I thought once I got hit on the nose they were going to stop,” he remembers, but his partner continued with his gloves up. A coach took a tissue to the bridge of his nose and squeezed hard, he stresses, and told him to carry on.
“I'm not really scared of a nosebleed any more,” he concludes, with a casual nonchalance. It's a philosophy that you could say the artist has brought to his career: to continue sparring even when the blood starts gushing. His rapid ascent to the top of the drill scene has come with its share of adversity, and yet here he is, still in the ring with a Top 5 charting album (last year's Strength to Strength, with Headie One) and 1.5 million Spotify listeners to his name. Throughout, he has been a shapeshifter, an enigma cycling through identities and determining what elements of himself to reveal.
Even so, K-Trap has always been forthcoming about what he does share, and every project since his debut mixtape, The , has evoked visceral images of his life in south London. On “Paper Plans”, he was trapped by encroaching authorities, recalling when he “”. He lamented the “” of life on “Street Side Effects”, but left space for dark humour too, as in breakout hit “Warm”, where he asserted that “”. “I don't want to do fairytales or paint a picture that's not really going on in my life or in the real world,” says the rapper. His latest album, ?, depicts an altogether new K-Trap, one who is open and liberated, but wrestling with what it means to be your authentic self when you have left home behind.
