Name: Coco

Where He’s From: Sheffield

When He Started: “I started making music around 2006. If it wasn’t for my school mates, I might never have even bothered to pick up a pen and write lyrics.”

Genre: Grime

File Next To: Capo Lee, Maxsta, Scrufizzer

Sounds Like: “Northern, enthusiastic, original.”

First Music That Inspired Him: “It would’ve been one of my old crew members from Youth Camp at the time. They’re the reason I started making music initially.”

Known as Coco since he was just nine years old, the fast-talking Sheffield MC first tried his hand at MCing in 2006, creating his own versions of the bangers of that era. “The first tune I ever made was either a refix of Busta Rhymes’ ‘Touch It’ with Youth Camp, or a refix of Essentials’ ‘State Your Name’,” he explains. “I remember recording it on a rubbish windows PC mic and the record programme; that one there had my ends going mad!”

Sheffield is, of course, also home to several other big players in the music scene like Toddla T, with whom Coco’s struck a fruitful creative partnership, gifting us anthems like “Ingredients” with Scrufizzer, “Big Bou Yah”, and more. Capitalising on the more open-minded attitudes towards accents from outside of London, Coco wears his Yorkshire accent loudly and proudly. Instead of trying to hide or town down his Northern twang, he accentuates it, finding new flows and rhythms in the flattened vowels and dropped consonants.

His most recent drop, “What Can You Do?”, taken from his upcoming Regional Murker EP, is prime Coco: dizzyingly fast bars, blink-and-you’ll-miss-em punchlines and limitless grime energy. According to his Twitter, this is ‘Coco 2.0’, and the future looks bright for the Steel City MC.