Name: Kadiata

Where He’s From: South London

When He Started: 2014

Genre: Brit-rap

File Next To: Sam Wise, Miles From Kinshasa, JJ, House Of Pharoahs

Sounds Like: “Mellow, progressive rap with an R&B feel.”

First Track That Inspired Him: “‘She’s The One’ by Robbie Williams.”

UK music’s underground scene is making more noise than ever and, as a multi-faceted artist and musician, Kadiata is one of the leaders of the new school. Quiet yet potent, understated yet detailed in execution, the rapper-singer-producer makes music for the late nights, early mornings and every mood in between. Since debuting on SoundCloud four years ago with “Anxiety”, the only way has been up for the South Londoner, who is just as adept at crafting braggadocios rap bangers as he is making ethereal R&B ballads. He describes his music to TRENCH as a mixture of “everything I grew up listening to; from the music channels in the 2000s, to PlayStation game soundtracks and even ‘90s TV show soundtracks—they were instantly familiar but so uniquely put together.”

The colour and vibrancy of Kadiata’s influences filter through into his music, in that his sound is almost otherworldly. Layered and full of texture that catapults it into another dimension, it remains mellow enough that his silky, composed vocals, tackling everything from relationships to his own identity, take centre stage. 2017 project Don’t Tell Me Plz is the proof in the pudding, a more formal introduction to an artist who is sonically light years ahead of his peers. He showed this further with a collaboration which spawned a track that captured the ears of many in 2017 onwards: Sam Wise’s “Rack Up”.

As friends, the process was simple for Kadiata: “[Sam] asks me if I have any beats lying around he could potentially have, so I played him a few incomplete ones and one of the them was ‘Rack Up’ but just the 808s, drums and the electric piano. He was like, ‘Yes, this is it; try add some more bits to it’, which is when I added the lead trumpet synth. Sam actually came up with adding the siren instrument and the rest is history.” This tag-team continued to make magic on this year’s collab, “When The Sun Comes Out”, and with credits on JJ’s (fka Jesse James Solomon) recent Strata EP for “Under The Sun” and Miles From Kinshasa’s “Analogue”, the South London-raised artist has continued to showcase his increasingly visible penchant for crafting underground anthems.

A confident young man aware of his own powers, Kadiata labels his upcoming music as “groundbreaking”—as big a statement as any but unsurprising given he has yet to miss. Watch this space very closely.