Name: Nori

Where He’s From: St Albans

When He Started: “I started releasing music in 2019, but I’d say I started properly in 2023.”

Genre: Grime / Experimental

File Next To: Kibo, TR Gobrazy, Ledbyher

Sounds Like: “If you put a Lord Of The Mics CD in a GameCube.”

First Music That Inspired Him: ”My brother always had Channel AKA on the TV; my logo is actually inspired by the Channel AKA logo, but it’s me playing a Nintendo DS. Then, for my 10th birthday, my brother gave me an iPod Shuffle and it had loads of songs on there: some Chris Brown tunes, some N-Dubz... That’s all I had, and I just listened to it all day, every day, for years.”

St Albans-raised MC Nori, of Guyanese-Scottish heritage, is proof that grime’s next chapter won’t necessarily be written where you’d expect. Growing up in a council house in an otherwise affluent Hertfordshire postcode, the 23-year-old says he spent years feeling like an outsider. “Especially being neurodivergent,” he tells TRENCH, “and a person of colour. I wasn’t hated, but I just never really felt like I found my people for a very long time.” Moving to London—and falling head-first in love with grime around 2022—changed everything. But the penny had started to drop a little earlier, when he landed a verse alongside Saiming, a rapper and close friend known for his pen. “People were saying that my verse was better than his,” he recalls. “I was like, ‘Oh shit! I can actually rap.’” R&B was his first home as a writer, but grime and rap gave him more room to say what he needed to: “I had a lot more to say, and I felt like those genres just suited me as a person a bit more.”

What sets Nori apart is where he goes digging. Most grime heads build their canon from cyphers, radio sets and legendary performances; Nori builds his around songs—specifically the album cuts everyone else skips past. “Those really deep-cut songs on Wiley albums, where it’s like Eski Boy aka Wiley, those are the things I listen to,” he says. “That’s what I love about grime. The deeper cuts, the things I want to hear, are the stuff that I make all the time.” If he had to soundtrack his life with one record, it would be Skepta’s Blacklisted. “My world sits very much in it,” he says. But his favourite song of all time comes from further afield: Majid Jordan’s “Summer’s Over Interlude” from Drake’s album, Views. “That song does something to my brain,” he explains. “It feels so representative of real life kicking in; you finish your day at work and have to go home, or I finish a show—just that limbo of reality setting back in. I want to make a song that feels like that.”

All of this feeds into Nori’s forthcoming project, File 1, a title lifted straight from the blank-slate screen of a childhood video game. “When you open up a video game, the first thing you do is click File 1,” he says. “This is the first time people are entering my world, and I’m trying to build my world in a way where I hit all the foundations.” Expect the deeper, more melodic side of Nori too: watching a song like “Miss You 2” connect has, he says, given him “more confidence to be deeper and more open about how I feel and the situations I find myself in.” From the outside, his rise looks steep, jumping from a couple thousand listeners to six figures after he decided, last September, to “really push the button this year.” From the inside, though, it’s the payoff for years spent building both his brand and his sound. “I knew it was going to work to some degree,” he says, “but I didn’t think it was going to work this well.” Not that File 1 is the destination: “When you’re on a road trip, you need to stop and get petrol and food. That’s File 1. I need to go there to go where I’m going next.” Wherever that is, grime remains his north star: “The way that I want to explore grime hasn’t really been done yet.” The rest, he hopes, will speak for itself.