Dave: Clash (feat Stormzy) review – unflappable cool from two cultural icons
Just before the England match on Wednesday night, TV viewers were greeted by Dave and Stormzy alongside Ian Wright. As promotional devices for your new single go, appearing before a viewing audience that topped out at 27.6m is not to be sniffed at, but you couldn’t deny that what they had to say was stirring. The gist was that we should forget about 1966 and indeed the intervening years: “The burden of ‘glorious failure’ … this new generation ain’t afraid of that … the past can’t hurt us … the future can inspire us … this is England, modern England.”
You could infer a lot from that, given the howls of outrage from the right about players taking the knee, but let’s concentrate on what the appearance says about Dave and Stormzy, and by extension UK rap in general: that it has not merely established itself at the centre of British pop music, but at the centre of British culture. Headlining Glastonbury or winning the Mercury is one thing, being called on to deliver a pep talk to the nation is quite another.
So you can hardly blame the first single from Dave’s forthcoming second album, We’re All Alone in This Together, for exuding a certain cool confidence. It’s musically low-key: there’s no obvious hook, the backing is based around a melancholy piano figure that occasionally drops out, leaving spectral, filtered synth in its place. The skittering snares are from the drill production playbook, and at certain moments – “Who’s got a new vest? Man, pop that shield, no microphone” – there are nods to the genre’s metre and combative stance. But it’s a measure of Dave’s confidence and artistry that he can incorporate drill into his own particular style.
The lyrics largely avoid social or political concerns in favour of lavishly expounding on commercial success and gamely attempting to parlay it into a date with model Jordyn Woods (in the case of Dave) and pursuing an ongoing feud with Chip (in that of Stormzy, who offers to write his nemesis a single: “Needed a hit, could have penned him one, cos you’re pending one”).
It’s sharp, subtle stuff: Dave’s reference to Jeremy Corbyn is clearly going to take some unpicking – a little disturbingly, he seems to be admiringly comparing a sexual partner to the former Labour leader – and there’s a fantastic jab from Stormzy at the former presenter of Good Morning Britain: “Off the set they storm like Piers / That’s what I call morning tears.”
It’s clearly a hit in waiting, building up momentum for We’re All In This Alone Together – which has a fair claim to being the most anticipated second album in UK rap history – without revealing too much about its contents. In interviews, Dave has been understandably cagey about discussing its contents, beyond vague intimations about it telling the story of his life from the release of Psychodrama onwards, and suggesting that James Blake is involved. For the time being, Clash sounds like a victory lap, the kind of single you would release if you didn’t have to grab people’s attention, because you’ve already got it.