Dave - ‘The Boy Who Played the Harp’

Widely regarded as one of the UK’s finest MCs - thanks, largely, to his impeccable wordplay and raw emotional honesty - David Omoregie has an impressively broad palette. He can do hip-hop braggadocio (‘Funky Friday’) and slick Afroswing (‘Raindance’) while dabbling in drill (‘Sprinter’), but it’s on the conscious side of things where he’s at his strongest. Seven years on from that seminal Mercury Prize win, ‘The Boy Who Played The Harp’ pushes that instinct further, seeing Dave turn his gaze inwards to explore faith, fame, responsibility, relationships, and the person he’s become over the course of his career.

At its core, the record is a concept album that alludes to David, the Biblical figure who plays the harp to soothe King Saul, paralleling Dave’s own relationship with music. Throughout, he uses this framework to consider his own purpose and place in the world. Here, as in much of Dave’s work, music is a means through which he tries to understand himself.

That sense of introspection places ‘The Boy Who Played The Harp’ firmly within the Prize’s tradition of artists using an album to examine something bigger than themselves. Of course, Dave has never been short of technical ability or ambition, but this time around those qualities become a means of asking questions rather than simply demonstrating his prowess. Piano, strings and understated percussion leave plenty of space for his words, while James Blake’s contributions add to the record’s poignant solemnity.

The aforementioned ‘Raindance’, featuring Nigerian singer Tems, opens things out into something warmer and more immediate, while ‘Chapter 16’ feels like a particularly significant moment. Featuring grime pioneer Kano - one of the artists Dave looked up to as a young person - the track creates a conversation between two generations of British rap. A decade ago, Dave supported Kano at London’s Troxy. Now, years later, they meet as peers in what feels like a powerful full-circle moment.

This lineage is important, although Dave’s closest artistic relatives aren’t necessarily found within one particular corner of UK rap; rather, he has more in common with the great album-making MCs across the Atlantic, like Nas, Kendrick Lamar and J. Cole. Like them, Dave treats rap as a space to examine identity, morality, ambition, and the complications of adulthood.

For an artist who has already achieved more than most, ‘The Boy Who Played The Harp’ isn’t concerned simply with celebrating those achievements, or resting on its laurels. Instead, it finds Dave asking what everything means, and where he goes from here. A decade into his career, the questions have changed, but the brilliance hasn’t.