The technicolour dawn of mellow grime

If there’s a story that encapsulates the viral power of mellow edits, it’s Ryder’s. While the young producer from Hull’s #skeptacore re-fixes don’t neatly fit the mellow grime template, eschewing the grainy, sample-led production style for minimalist ambience and subtle textures, they carry real emotional clout. ‘#skeptacore pt.3’ — featuring the verses of ‘Text Me Back’ laid over ethereal strings — went, in his own words, “into orbit” on TikTok in October 2023, accruing hundreds of thousands of likes. Big Smoke himself sent Ryder a DM soon after. He then travelled to Skepta’s London studio to begin work on ‘48 Hours’, their joint EP. The release has been streamed over 50million times on Spotify since it landed in November 2023. “The reason ‘#skeptacore pt.3’ did so well is the bassline,” he muses. “That’s the ‘Heartbroken’ bassline. That’s what makes it. The emotion of the music is carried by it. The journey of the bass is what contextualises the rest of the melodics and the acapella… the instrumental gives the vocal more presence.”

Mellow grime instrumentals are painted like rainbow sunsets, in shades of cool powder blue, pink and purple. Because of this, they operate on a different emotional register than traditional grime beats. When paired with a fearsome acapella, the results can be transformative. “It’s not about elevating the freestyles,” says Lancashire born-and-bred producer Wilfred, who dropped his first volume of ‘Wilfred Edits’ in September 2022. “The sound I put on them sidesteps the vocals into something else, a different feeling, a different mood.”

Wilfred’s approach was inspired by one of mellow grime’s early pathfinders: Douvelle19. Born and raised in Newport, in South Wales, the producer was a founding member of Astroid Boys — a band that fused punk with grime and developed a cult following in the mid 2010s. He was enamoured with Knxwledge’s MEEK mixtape series, which transformed Meek Mill’s earliest corner freestyles into dusky dream sequences. Starting in 2018, Douvelle19 began reproducing around the raucous freestyles that he spent his youth huddled around a mobile phone listening to, and then uploaded the results to Youtube. His first edit cloaks a venomous Ghetts freestyle in silky neo-RnB. “The juxtaposition was I’m gonna make it soft, musical, and really tonal,” he explains. “And I always made sure I added some old Eski samples, like little clicks and clacks, just to pay homage to grime… my aim was to make the sonic bed of the track make sense to the vocal, so it always felt like they were spitting on that track originally. And isolating vocals wasn’t easy. This was before AI, bro.”