Name: namesbliss

Where He’s From: Cricklewood, North-West London

When He Started: “I started writing bars in primary school, but the first song that I released was in 2017.”

Genre: Jazzy rap meets lo-fi grime

File Next To: DC, Paul Stephan, Reek0

Sounds Like: “It’s heavily grime-influenced, grime-infused, but I’m rapping. I would say a lot of it is futuristic and jazzy. It’s got a groove to it. I don’t know who termed it, but someone termed it lo-fi grime. I quite like that. I’m not, like, the genre police. Lo-fi grime sounds like an apt description of it, but I’m not all into that. The genre names have got mad.”

First Music That Inspired Him: “The first piece of music I heard that made me want to be an artist was Nas’ Illmatic. In terms of being an MC, it was two songs: Kano’s ‘Ps & Qs’, and then Kano was on another song called ‘Get Set’ with Low Deep, Ghetts, Demon, Big Seac, and Doctor. Kano’s verse on that—oh my days! What a verse. What a riddim!”

You can get all your ducks in a row, do everything right, but ultimately, timing is everything. For namesbliss, the timing has never been better. He’s done everything right, of course, but this year, his years of work have paid off in big ways. Key to his success is the team around him, particularly the producers he works with. With Vagrant Real Estate, he scored some of his earliest successes: “Falls On Me”, “Vibin” and “I’m In The Ends” quickly gave us an insight into their working relationship at the top of this decade. That they work so well together should come as no surprise, really. After all, Bliss and VRE have been collaborators for some time now, both members of the Leftfield crew alongside DeeRiginal, Samson, Dave Creates, Melvillous and TRTL.

That’s not the only MC/producer bond Bliss has, though. The name scruz has been a regular fixture in the production credits on his music, and with good reason: alongside Vagrant Real Estate and t.o, scruz is one of the key architects behind Bliss’ lo-fi grime sound. “He pushes the boat out there,” namesbliss says of working with scruz. “He moves the needle with his production, and you can just tell he’s not afraid to try different things. His ability to convey vibe and emotion through his beats, in my opinion, is second to none. It's one thing to have the technical ability, but it’s another thing being able to convey vibe. That almost ethereal chill sound and the strong emotional current fit so perfectly with my rap style, which is all about intonation, tone and cadence. It just works.”

Between his tireless work ethic, his talent, and his trusted team, a breakthrough moment was inevitable for namesbliss—it was just a matter of time. He’d been on an upward swing for a while, but the release of “Iniesta Flow” felt like a tipping point. “It wasn’t planned,” he claims, but he knew it could be something. “That instrumental played and I just scrapped my bars,” he adds. It didn’t take long for him to really understand what he had on his hands: “I was inundated with all the messages. It’s one thing to go viral, but then everyone was DMing me saying, ‘We want this song! We want this song!’”

Wisely, Bliss was quick to capitalise on it and release it as a complete track (“I put it out within five days”), and he’s kept the momentum going with freestyle sessions, radio sets—even a cameo as one of the performing MCs in the latest season of Top Boy—all leading up to the release of his debut album, Lively Experience, and a four-date December tour through Glasgow, Manchester, Bristol and Birmingham.

As 2024 draws to a close, the wake of the album’s release feels like a turning point. Now more established and with a well-defined hybrid sound to put his name to, the album arrived at the perfect time—perfect to capitalise on the momentum he’d built up so far, but better still to give him a fully-realised opus to immortalise the hybrid sound that’s become his calling card. “It’s a combination of it all,” he says proudly. “That’s the album.”