Skepta wins the Mercury Prize for 'Konnichiwa'

Why it matters

Konnichiwa came out May 6, 2016, on Boy Better Know (Skepta's own label). The album was self-released after Skepta walked away from his earlier major-label arrangements. It is his fourth studio LP. The album won the Mercury Prize in September 2016, the second grime album to take the UK's most prestigious record-of-the-year award (after Dizzee Rascal's Boy in da Corner in 2003). The Mercury win, combined with Drake's parallel signing of Skepta to a UK distribution deal with OVO Sound in mid-2016, marked grime's full re-entry into the international rap conversation after a mid-2000s commercial trough. Skepta had spent the years between his early-2010s underground records and Konnichiwa rebuilding his own catalog around uncompromising production and direct verses; the album consolidates the work. "Shutdown," "That's Not Me," "Crime Riddim," "Man." Konnichiwa is the album that, after fifteen years of grime existing primarily as a UK phenomenon, finally pushed it into the American rap mainstream conversation in a way Wiley and Dizzee in 2003 had not quite managed. You should hear it.