Pressing play on Full Wack No Brakes, the debut album from Bad Boy Chiller Crew, felt like being slapped over the head with a sock full of pressed pills. Who are these semi-feral British twentysomethings, and why are they rapping so hard over such delightfully peppy dance beats? you might have asked, alongside questions like, Who thought it was a good idea to give them cocaine? and Why is one of them called “Clive”?
As the frenetic frisson of Full Wack opening track “450” faded away, answers began to emerge from the fog-machine mist. Bad Boy Chiller Crew is made up of three dudes: Kane, GK, and the aforementioned Clive. They proudly refer to themselves as “charvas,” a sort of post-chav British slang word which, according to the definition printed on the packs of rolling papers sold at their official merch store, is “a disparaging term for a poor or uneducated young person, especially one who behaves in a brash or vulgar manner and wears ostentatious clothing and jewelry.” They’re from Bradford, a staunchly blue-collar city in Yorkshire that, since the mid-2000s, has been one of the epicenters of bassline, a type of sunny bleep-bloop-ba-dump-a-bump dance music that the late cultural critic Mark Fisher once called “a fabulous sweet shop, full of delicious sugar rushes.” Bassline is the wellspring from which BBCC’s beats flow, which explains why they sound like they do. As for Clive, your guess is as good as mine.
Though Bad Boy Chiller Crew are still an underground concern in the States, Full Wack No Brakes set the trio on a path to becoming a genuine force in their home country. Since its release, they’ve signed with Sony and put out an EP whose single “Don’t You Worry About Me,” which also appears on their new mixtape Disrespectful, notched them a UK Top 40 hit. They made the cover of NME and became the subject of an ITV reality show. Their 2022 live schedule includes sold-out shows and festival appearances from Manchester to Croatia. In a recent video interview, Clive says he used to work construction and Kane talks about training to be a glassblower, only to get laid off after completing his apprenticeship. You get the sense that the group is still in a state of shock that any of this is happening at all.
Part of their appeal, beyond the exhilarating oddness of watching three young men who still look like teenagers rap about doing drugs over not-particularly-fashionable dance tracks, is that outside of their music, BBCC turn abject dumbness into something approaching performance art. The group got their start in part by making goofy and often gross comedy skits, and they’ve remained true to their roots. In recent months, they’ve filmed themselves enthusiastically diving into frozen puddles, throwing poop at their manager, tattooing a fan’s forehead, and holding a contest to see whether Clive could drink a fifth’s worth of Jägerbombs before GK could chug a two-liter bottle of high-gravity cider (this last video has been deleted; GK finished first but Clive threw up more, so I think it’s safe to call it a tie).
But to focus solely on their antics would be to overlook BBCC’s actual music, which is often genuinely thrilling and not quite like anything else out there. When it comes to hip-hop artists rooted in a hyper-regional sound who’ve freshly aligned themselves with a major, the concern is always that the label will water down their style in an attempt to chase mainstream success at the expense of what made them interesting. In the lead-up to Disrespectful, it momentarily seemed that this was the direction the group might have been headed. In July 2021, Kane told Mixmag that their future releases would be “proper music mate, commercial, stuff that you hear on charts ‘n that. We’re going for commercial, we’re not going for the underground.”
On Disrespectful, though, it turns out that Bad Boy Chiller Crew’s idea of going for the big time mainly involves ditching the hooligan-esque chants that populated Full Wack No Brakes in favor of soulful house samples, rapping about cocaine slightly less often than they used to, and recruiting the Grammy-winning Newcastle producer Riton to do the beat for “Come With Me.” The rest of the instrumentals are handled by their DJ, the Bradford producer TACTICS, who uses his expanded role—he had a handful of credits on Full Wack—as an opportunity to push the group to embrace a broader constellation of dance music. Thanks to him, we have the Craig David-esque two-step garage of “BMW,” the R&B balladry of “Stick Around,” and the kitchen-sink Ibiza-rap of “Wasting Time,” probably the best example of the form since Tinie Tempah’s “Pass Out.” The brightly stuttering synths of “Bikes N Scoobys” and filter-happy sample populating “Somebody Else” make the tacit argument that idiosyncratic regional scenes often do a better job of recreating the warped pop of early PC Music than PC Music itself ever did.
Lyrically, these guys aren’t exactly reinventing the wheel. Rarely do they deviate from their preferred subjects of A) going crazy with their boys on the way to, at, and back from the club, and B), offering heartfelt apologies to their girlfriends for the dumb shit they pulled last night when they were out with their boys. Which is fine—write what you know, and honestly, the less said about this mixtape’s forays into not-particularly-convincing raps about how good the individual members of Bad Boy Chiller Crew are at sex, the better.
But Kane, easily the most skilled MC of the three, finds creativity within this constraint, rapping with such fire that even verses about drunk-driving stolen whips to a rave begin to resemble intense expressions of Bradford pride. On “Somebody Else,” probably the tape’s finest track, he takes his breathless, minute-long verse in unexpected directions, beginning with braggadocious lines about stealing cars before dropping the cool-guy facade, rapping, “I’m from a place where kids wear Nike Air/This shit a nightmare/I don’t wanna die here.” Over the throbbing Chicago house of “Come With Me,” he offers street-level sociology, painting a picture of a hometown full of “daylight robberies, raiding properties, kids in poverty, messed-up morally.” In these moments, he places the rest of the tape in context: Bradford is the fifth-most income-deprived district in England, youth unemployment is high, and nearly a third of adults did not finish secondary school. They don’t just party because it’s fun. They party because everything else around them sucks and there’s not shit else to do.
But these unexpected forays into depth are the exception that proves the rule, and Disrespectful is still largely a mixtape meant to get you so pumped up that you’ll feel like chugging Strongbow out of a traffic cone. The trio clearly understand that Kane is their most valuable asset, and tend to place him front-and-center on tracks, allowing him to rap for the majority of the song and then bringing in GK and/or Clive for a quick clean-up verse or two. Each offers a distinct sensibility—GK tends to favor a nimble stop-and-start flow that provides a nice counterbalance to Kane’s verbal acrobatics, while Clive’s thick Yorkshire accent brings personality to every line, even when it’s something like, “Shots at the bar, I’m lit!” Their levity throws Kane’s this-rap-shit-is-deadly-serious-mate vibes into sharp relief, helping to spotlight his genuine talent while injecting a sense of fun into the affair.
Like a Tasmanian devil with two 40-ounces duct-taped to his hands, Bad Boy Chiller Crew are a wacky, manic perpetual motion machine leaving chaos in their wake. Disrespectful sounds like the rap equivalent of a cartoon tornado, which is what makes it hard to dismiss them as a novelty act or an organically grown version of People Just Do Nothing’s hapless Kurupt FM crew. In a recent interview with MTV, GK described them as “a real boyband from Bradford,” only for Kane and Clive to erupt into giggles. Looking at the trio, the joke is obvious. They don’t look like pop stars; they look like three young men plucked out of any low-wage job in Yorkshire. They’re brash, they’re rude, they’re definitely not sober, and through it all, they come across as genuinely wholesome and heartfelt. At a time when new artists are actively encouraged to act like miniature tech startups, prioritizing your own charming idiocy can go a long way.
