By Ryan Thompson
He’s hit the Top 10 with his past three EPs, but Bugzy’s career is set to reach new heights with the August 17 release of his debut album ‘B. Inspired’. After launching the project with ‘Warning’, Bugzy now amplifies anticipation for the album with a double-shot of activity: not only has he dropped a new track and video in the shape of ‘Drama’, but he’s also announced his biggest headline tour to date.
[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kD-pSgSsFMY[/embed]
‘Drama’ finds Bugzy’s incendiary rhymes exploring a narrative based around the anticipation and intensity of the preparations for a major heist. It’s also a cautionary tale. Had events in his life unfolded differently, the criminal world might’ve been Bugzy’s reality – an existence that’s glamorous for the disenfranchised but with dangerously high odds of mortal failure. Instead he’s on a mission to champion young people who’ve been dealt a bad hand in life.
“‘Drama’ is what my life could’ve been like if I didn’t turn things around,” says Bugzy. “There are other ways out than crime. I’m now in a place where I can speak to a lot of people and my whole ethos is switching on the belief switch in people’s heads. If people take inspiration from that then it’s priceless.”
Backed by production by Diztortion (Stormzy, Kano), the track’s spaghetti western-style introduction and searing guitar solo from Alastair O’Donnell (Tinie Tempah, Krept & Konan) infuses ‘Drama’ with a cinematic scale atmosphere that evokes Bugzy’s love of the gritty Netflix crime drama ‘Narcos’ and the visionary directors Quentin Tarantino and Christopher Nolan.
The official video for the track was put together by Bugzy with his regular collaborator Connor Hamilton and filmed at various locations in Dubai. Extending Bugzy’s track record for high end, conceptual visuals, it interweaves an intense film-within-a-film crime narrative with performance footage shot at the top of a skyscraper.
Having already claimed his crown as The King of the North, Bugzy’s set to take his gospel further afield with the biggest tour of his career. The ‘B. Inspired’ tour is the biggest headline tour to date by any grime artist and will see him perform to a total of 38,000+ people. It includes two 4000-capacity homecoming shows at Manchester’s Mayfield Depot. Bugzy will be bringing his tour to Oxford at the O2 Academy 1 on October 21.
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