We’re in a basement studio in Soho with West London rapper AJ Tracey, who’s explaining that he used to cut 0.1 seconds from the end of each track when he sent it to friends so that he’d know who was responsible if it leaked. That might sound paranoid for most artists, but when one of your better songs can hit the top of the charts and rocket to multiplatinum status, there’s no such thing as being too careful.
Gearing up for the release of third album ‘Don’t Die Before You’re Dead’, AJ is sitting firmly at the top of the UK music pyramid. His debut self-titled album went to number 3, follow-up ‘Flu Game’ hit number 2, and he’s had 5 top 5 singles across his career – not bad, by anyone’s reckoning. More impressively, he’s done all of it on his own terms, remaining independent and only dropping when he feels like he has something worth releasing, as evidenced by the four-year gap between ‘Flu Game’ and his upcoming album.
“I’m a perfectionist,” he acknowledges. “We’re all going to finish making music at some point, and I think you want to look back and be proud of at least 99% of what you’ve put out. There might be a few tracks where you don’t agree with what you said, or you don’t like the sound anymore, but you want to be proud of it as a whole. I don’t believe in microwave dinners when it comes to music – it’s got to be good, and that can take some time.”
While ‘only releasing music when you have good music to release’ feels like a no-brainer, it’s often not as simple as it seems – especially in today’s 24/7 world of social media fandom. For better or for worse, rap has always been a fast-moving genre which favours recency. On the one hand, that means one big single can catapult an artist from the bottom of a festival bill to the very top, but on the other, a few years away can run the risk of people permanently forgetting who you are. Consistent festival appearances and song features are one way of plugging the gap, but it can still be tough to hold the line and resist dropping a new track before it’s ready.
“I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t get anxious,” AJ says. “I have days when I’m down, or a bit worried about the future, but what keeps me going is that 15-year-old AJ would have traded almost anything to get where I am right now, so I need to be grateful for what I have. Some people make great music and just aren’t accepted, and some people don’t get to do what they love as a job. So I do get anxious, but having good quality music that I’m proud of is so much more important than staying relevant, and staying relevant is much more than putting out music. It’s standing for something as a person and people buying into you because of that.
“I’m big on community stuff and empowering people. Even being independent, that’s an ethos for me and a narrative that people will push, whether I push it or not. One thing that also gives me space to breathe is that my monthly listeners have stayed high, and the fans keep listening. My hand isn’t forced into dropping music to make money or to remind people I’m here – I’ve got a back catalogue which was really hard to build, but I’m happy with it. I’m content.”
That breathing room is something that a lot of rappers never get to experience in a genre which can be incredibly fickle. The list of young artists who have had a runaway hit and never managed to properly capitalise on it is a lot longer than the list of household names who have stuck it out year after year. At 31 years old, AJ is hardly an elder statesman, but he is finding himself in a position where new artists are looking up to him in the way he used to look up to people who were already legends when he was a teenager.
“Being an older is about how long you’ve been here for, not how old you are.” says AJ. “An artist might be 24, but if they’ve been here since they were 15, that’s a long time in most people’s eyes. So in that sense I definitely feel like I should be one of the people in music who’s opening doors for people younger than me, or trying to advise or help or guide where I can, but also you don’t want to feel like you’re belittling anyone. It’s more that if there’s something that I can pass on to help people avoid pitfalls that I stepped in, then I will. I’m still putting out my own music and bettering myself, but I’m also trying to lift up people younger than me, for sure.”
“I wanted to make an album that you won’t understand unless you’re British”
Setting an example isn’t just musical for AJ, though. From endorsing Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party in 2017, to partnering with food banks each Christmas and candidly discussing issues close to his heart, there’s a genuine sense of duty to his commitments. In no small part, this is something instilled by his mum, a “proper hippy” who named him Ché, after the Marxist revolutionary, “to make sure I had no chance at being right-wing,” AJ says with a laugh. Away from being *ahem* gently nudged by his mum, AJ has spoken eloquently on causes like homelessness, youth work, and modern masculinity, as well as urging people to vote.
“I like to do my research rather than speak on something I’m not informed on,” he says. “But I also mainly try to tackle topics that I feel I can make an impact on because there are a million things we need to solve on this planet, and I can’t solve all of them. I remember around the time of ‘Grime for Cobyn’ I opened up my Snapchat DMs and had so many messages from people saying they voted because of me – that’s powerful, bro. I’ve made a change. It’s not even about people voting for who I voted for; it’s about getting out there and taking action or educating yourself on a topic. It’s getting boots on the ground, getting people walking.
“I genuinely care about everything I speak about, too. If I don’t care, I don’t talk about it. This might sound a bit controversial, but I don’t think there’s an obligation for me to speak about anything. I’ve built my platform myself, and anyone who built their platform has the right to use it to speak on anything they want. How can someone who didn’t help you at all turn around and tell you what you should be speaking about? You put in the grind, you can use the end result however you want. Obviously, I’m gonna caveat that by saying it’s our moral duty to speak about things that are important and to try to make a positive difference any way we can, and I always will do that – but it has to be a personal choice, not something somebody has forced you to do.”
Anyone who’s been a fan of AJ Tracey won’t be shocked to hear about his political convictions and the role his mum has played in his life and career. Despite this, it’s not something which has featured in a lot of his songs up until now, with braggadocio and wordplay taking precedence over more personal topics. ‘Don’t Die Before Your Dead’ is a hard pivot away from this approach, with some of his most personal material in years. The chest-thumping references to expensive clothes and bedroom prowess are still here on tracks like the massive ‘Crush’, featuring Jorja Smith, but they jostle for space among deeper, more reflective material.
“The new album’s a lot more vulnerable,” he says. “I feel like as an artist, you need to be striving to teach your listeners and supporters something new about yourself on each project because otherwise, why would they bother listening to it? If I’m saying the same thing I was saying five years ago, where’s the growth, what’s changed?
“I used to feel the need to shield people from my real life by wearing the AJ Tracey mask. But on this album, I’ve dropped that a bit because I realised that being scared to open up because people might say horrible stuff on the internet isn’t worth it. It’s the internet, people are saying horrible stuff about me anyway – there’s nothing I can do about that!”
The centre point of this decision to let his guard down is an emotional reckoning with his mum’s battle with breast cancer on one track from the album. It’s a topic the old AJ never would have dreamed of tackling, but one he handles in an emotional way without being maudlin or resorting to cliché.
“This song about my mum,” he says. “It’s something no one knows about me apart from close friends and family. It was a deep topic to delve into and I didn’t actually ask her permission, which is a little bit risky, but I hope she understands that it’s my life and I need to write about what I’ve been through. My mum’s here; she’s healthy and happy, and a lot of people listening will be in similar situations, and hopefully, it’ll empower them in some way. If they listen and they think ‘he’s alright, he’s kicking on’ then maybe it’ll make them feel stronger about their situation.
“It’s something that was especially hard for me because of how close I am to my family,” he continues. “I moved out of my mum’s house when I was 23, and that flat was tight. Her room was right next to mine and she could hear everything, maybe more than she’d want to hear, honestly.” He says with a laugh. “Before I moved out, she was complaining about me and my bredren kicking up noise, but as soon as I left she was calling me up and telling me to come over – you know how it is. I never thought I was gonna leave home because I didn’t have any prospects, and we were in the hood, so it was a move neither of us was expecting so fast.
“When I did move out, though, I learned the world is a different place to how it seems when you’re at your mum’s house – and I don’t just mean doing your own washing. Life doesn’t seem as dark when your parent is standing in front of you and blocking things for you, but once you’re in the forefront, it’s a bit darker. All those things heavily, heavily shaped who I am, but my mum having my back provided me with a stable foundation to always fall back on. If music doesn’t work out, if I don’t have any money, I can just go home to my mum’s house, and it’ll all be cool.”
Alongside and intertwined with this strong family foundation is a sense of pride in where AJ comes from, with references to West London peppering his music – not least on ‘Ladbroke Grove’, one of his biggest singles, named after the area he’s from. With ‘Don’t Die Before You’re Dead’, that hometown pride remains, but has been widened out to include the whole of the UK, a concept that he acknowledges is a tougher sell to audiences more used to associating ‘British pride’ with reactive politics and xenophobia than with anything positive.
“I want people to listen to the album and be reminded that we’re from the best place on Earth. I should be gassed that I’m from the UK! Not in an EDL way, but in the way of: we set fashion trends, we set music trends, we’re massively multicultural, most people here are very open-minded, everyone’s always copying us. We need a bit of unity in this country, and no matter what class or race background, we’re all British. We’re so British that we’re a caricature of ourselves. Americans try to take the piss out of us and say, ‘Oh, you drink tea, and there’s red phone boxes everywhere’. Then they come here, and it’s all true, especially if they’re in my area and Big Ben is right next door.
“Thinking about that, I wanted to make an album that you won’t understand unless you’re British. I want Americans to listen and have to research what I’m on about, because so many of the topics and themes are unique to Britain and to my experience as a mixed-race kid growing up in London. So on ‘Crush’, I’m thinking about being a kid and running home to jump on MSN and message the girl I liked, so I tried to make it fit that era, that vibe. ‘Joga Bonito’, I grew up playing football on the pitches where they shot the Joga Bonito videos for Nike, so it’s all connected. 99% of the people involved are British too.”
“I don’t believe in microwave dinners when it comes to music – it’s got to be good, and that can take some time”
The British dominance on the production-side is mirrored by the features on the album, with UK names featuring prominently. From Jorja Smith on ‘Crush’ to Aitch and Headie One on ‘Friday Prayer’, each additional artist feature is designed to bring a new angle to the overall theme, whether it’s Jorja offering the female counterpart to AJ’s teenaged MSN Casanova, or Aitch and Headie giving snippets of their childhood to broaden the trip down memory lane from West to North London and Manchester.
“‘Friday Prayer’ is about where we’re from and where we are now,” explains AJ. “Where I’m from is predominantly Muslim, so instead of Church on Sunday, we’ve got Friday prayer and our different rituals for the weekend. But having all three of us on the track – me being mixed heritage from West London, Aitch being British from Manchester, and Headie being of African descent from North London – it’s three different perspectives on life, and it blends London and the UK. Headie and Aitch are my bredrens, so I knew they’d understand the vibe and just come and give a great verse that was on theme.
“I’m also at a point where my team and I know how to put an album together, and we know there’s a freedom to have songs that aren’t as commercially viable on there. I don’t have someone listening to a song and saying, ‘Ok great, but can we put NLE Choppa on it so it sells more?’ I’m not even joking, these conversations happen. But I know, and my team know, that we can get a balance on the album, and I can put those non-commercial songs on there as long as there are still a few big singles. I’m talking a lot about the deeper songs, but obviously, I’ve got a whole load of live bangers, too. Sometimes I just write bars that sound hard, it’s a balance,” he adds with a laugh.
“There’s a few songs on the album which I’ve had in mind for live shows,” he continues. “It’s funny because I’m putting setlists together, and it’ll be songs from eight years ago, six years ago, last week, then five years ago. It’s a blessing to have songs with that longevity, but I was literally a kid when I made some of these songs, and I’m still doing them live! If it was a setlist for me, it’d be a load of random songs that you lot have probably never heard, but it’s not about me when I’m playing live, it’s about gassing up the people who have paid to see you.
“I do research before I play somewhere. If I’m playing Reading festival, I’m looking up what the people in Reading listen to and adjusting the set to reflect that. It’s a mission; you want to make sure you’ve got your intel right, and you aren’t just copy-pasting your setlist at every show because if you do that, do you really care about your fans?”
Throughout our chat, this focus on the fans is something AJ comes back to again and again. A call-out on social media took things a step further than tailoring setlists this time around, with AJ asking fans where he should play on his confusingly titled ‘Not Even a Tour’, which, it turns out, is a tour after all. Tiny venues, places which probably haven’t seen anything but a tribute act in several years, and a route which probably gave his tour manager a severe headache, it’s exactly the kind of glorious nonsense we’ve come to expect from the indie bands Dork delights in bothering, but much more novel from a rapper who could comfortably fill an arena or two.
“It’s chaotic! We might have regretted it a little bit,” he says, grinning like a man who definitely does not regret it. “I just thought, people live outside of London or Manchester or Birmingham, and they deserve a show at some point. People are saying ‘come to Blackpool!’ and I just thought, why not? It’s a nice reset to go and connect with fans at these small, independent local venues that people know and love. We’ll share a moment; I’ll be right in front of people – I’ll probably even do requests if people shout loud enough.
“It’s the smallest venues I’ve played for a while, but I’m gonna give that Glasto main stage energy, just in your local. We’re a small island, we’ve got these venues with a lot of hometown charm, and it’s not always about making money. Sometimes it’s about reconnecting with the fans and giving something back, because I’m grateful for them listening to me. Hopefully, it’ll be lit, but if it’s a bunch of old folks playing darts and shouting requests at me, let’s do it – let’s rave with the OAPS!”
Taken from the June 2025 issue of Dork. AJ Tracey’s album ‘Don’t Die Before You’re Dead’ is out 13th June.
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