Manchester rapper Meekz has a voice like treacle: thick and heavy, with a tang of burnt sweetness. His accent—sculpted in the city’s Gorton district—means he can rhyme “stupidly” with “luckily” and “mumsy” with “comfy.” Meekz seems to be aware of the fact that his voice is compelling, employing it sparingly and deliberately. Since first surfacing in 2018, he’s eschewed ubiquity; rather than churning out a constant stream of singles and social media posts, he’s kept his catalog to a handful of carefully crafted singles that funnel hints of No Limit, Luniz, and G-funk swagger through bottom-heavy production. He makes events of his music videos—rolling tanks across industrial wastelands for “Can’t Stop Won’t Stop;” hanging out of a helicopter above London on “Respect the Come Up”—then retreats, as if his permanently-affixed ski mask isn’t enough to fully conceal him from the world. Respect the Come Up is his first full mixtape, and relatively tight at 10 tracks. It serves as an exacting personal manifesto as much as a public broadcast, one summed up in the spare arrangement, and title, of its opening track: “Say Less.”
For all his introspection, Meekz and his producers make rap in widescreen. The sax on “Hustler’s Ambition” is pure Michael Bay; the Dave-featuring, heavy-flexing “Fresh Out the Bank” boasts strings fit for Steven Spielberg. On “Take Losses,” he channels boxing pay-per-view bluster with Tyson Fury in his corner. Lyrically, he zooms in and out with casual ease, tracing a line between street ennui and the boredom of riches: “It’s sick to imagine all these things that I think in the mansion, going into an Instagram caption,” he offers on “Instagram Caption.” A zig-zag flow makes these reflections sound idle, even as he toes a balance between blunt force and wisecracking. Such is the sheer mass of his voice: It gives a half-baked, half-sung chorus like “I need more money” a gravity it doesn’t deserve. But just as it’s easier to accept that gravity is simply there than it is to explain how it works, Meekz sweeps you along with his candor—and soon offers rewards, turning out pithy, searching lines with disarming nonchalance.
The themes here are well-worn, even after less than a dozen tracks. But songs like skippy, guitar-picking highlight “Patience” suggest Meekz can speak for an audience beyond his personal confines too. And when he does, with that voice, you can’t help but listen in.
