Psychodrama is released

Why it matters

Psychodrama came out March 8, 2019, on Neighbourhood Recordings/Universal. Dave (David Orobosa Omoregie), then 20, is a South London MC from Streatham who had been releasing tightly written singles and EPs since 2015. The album is his debut full-length. The album is structured as eleven tracks framed as a therapy session, with extended monologues that move through Dave's history (his older brother's life sentence for murder, his mother's struggles, his own depression, the broader political-and-racial dynamics of being Black in the UK). "Black," the centerpiece, is a six-minute extended-essay verse on what "Black" means inside British identity. The album won the 2019 Mercury Prize, becoming the second hip-hop or grime LP to win the UK's premier album award (after Dizzee Rascal's Boy in da Corner in 2003). Dave was 20 when he made it. The writing on the album is the writing of an MC who reads. You should hear Psychodrama in order. The therapy-session conceit works because the verses earn it.