One of the most exciting musical forces to emerge from the UK in recent memory, GAIKA's a name that should already be familiar to you.

His Machine and Security mixtapes from 2015 and 2016, respectively, were impressive feats of creativity that let us all know something entirely different had arrived. On the back of those releases, GAIKA dropped collabs with Mykki Blanco ("Push More Weight") and SOPHIE ("Immigrant Sons (Pesos & Gas)"), was named as Dazed's Political Editor-At-Large, and released the colossal multimedia project The Spectacular Empire Parts I & II.

In short, GAIKA's output since the project's inception has been ambitious and thrilling to watch. With his new album Basic Volume fresh out the gates, it seems the album format has only focused his creative vision as he uses his wildly experimental sounds to explore a whole host of themes, from black identity, toxic masculinity and politics through to love, loneliness and smaller scale concepts familiar to us all.

The album dropped this weekend and the reviews quickly followed, but we'd recommend letting this one take its time on you. One of the key things with GAIKA is your first listen is rarely anything like your third, fourth or even fifth listen. Let it breathe, keep coming back to it, but mostly just take your time with it.