This year, TRENCH celebrates its seventh anniversary. It might not be a round number, but given the ever-worsening landscape of music journalism, as we watch platform after platform and publication after publication fall by the wayside, we thought our continued survival was worth celebrating all the same.

As part of the celebrations, we teamed up with one of the most exciting cultural forces of the 2020s, Travs Presents, for a good old-fashioned grime set. Taking to the NTS airwaves, our Founder/EIC, Joseph ‘JP’ Patterson, and Contributing Editor Yemi Abiade sat down with the popular UK music archivist Da Metal Messiah to dig through TRENCH’s backstory before welcoming in some of grime’s biggest players from across the years—Flirta D, Duppy, Manga Saint Hilare, Mez, JayaHadADream, Shakes, Renz, Kibo, Rawza, Babydoom, PeteNotLarry, and Imperial, with Chamber45 and Grandmixxer on deck.

Since TRENCH was born in 2017, we’ve seen a lot of changes. We’ve watched movements like #BRITSsowhite and the Black Lives Matter movement jumpstart a push for platforms to correct with more representation. Sadly, in a lot of cases, that proved to be temporary lipservice in some cases and others was met with a backlash from a reactionary right wing. In a lot of ways, things have gotten worse, but there’s still plenty of cause for hope and optimism. Black British music is still the dominant cultural force, setting the tempo for the rest of the world. For the first time, US hip-hop is playing catch-up to UK rap. The world looks to our artists for fashion cues and its our producers who are being imported to for the benefit of their Midas touch.

Thankfully, unlike so many of our contemporaries, we’re still on the ground to document it all. And it’s not just the cutting edge; our HERITAGE series showed the world just how much treasure there is online, and also how easy it is for us to forget about some of the most important moments in music history—if we don’t make a proactive effort to catalogue them. Now, countless platforms are digging up and resharing these all-but-forgotten pieces of history, and the culture is all the richer for it. That idea of emphasising certain cultural touchstones is one of the core tenets of TRENCH.

Similarly, we’ve worked just as hard to remind our readers of the importance of language and the way we talk about culture. We’ve published features examining the damage that can be done when we talk about genres being “dead”, we’ve pushed against narratives that are dismissive of Black music, and championed overlooked artists and sounds from across the board. It’s not about contrarianism either, we’ve eschewed negative criticism and snark in favour of something much more valuable: and that is to uplift and champion young, Black British creatives in every field. Here’s to the next 7!