Skepta is back with “The Fork and Knife,” his first solo album in seven years, and for grime \u2014 and for British rap as a whole \u2014 that gap is the story. The record arrives as a fresh write-up this morning, but its meaning has been building for the better part of a decade, since Skepta last released a solo album and turned his attention to everything else: fashion, features, family, and the long work of staying relevant without chasing the charts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
To understand why this album matters, it helps to remember where Skepta came from. He was one of grime’s founding architects, building the sound from Tottenham with his brother JME and the Boy Better Know collective, and for years the scene he helped create was treated as an underground concern \u2014 urgent, inventive, and largely ignored by the mainstream. Then came “Konnichiwa” in 2016, a Mercury Prize-winning album that carried grime to the center of British music and turned Skepta into a global figure, working with Drake, headlining festivals, and becoming a fashion presence in his own right.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His last solo album, “Ignorance Is Bliss” in 2019, landed in a different moment \u2014 a more reflective record from an artist who had already proved his point. Since then, Skepta has remained visible without releasing a solo album: collaborations, guest verses, the fashion label Mains, and work with the next generation of artists. The seven-year wait was not an absence. It was a long pause from an artist who has never rushed, and who has always preferred to move on his own clock.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
That is what makes “The Fork and Knife” a real event rather than a routine release. Solo albums are where an artist says what they actually think, without the filter of a feature or a compilation, and for Skepta, who has always used his records to draw a line between the underground and the mainstream, the return to that format after seven years is a statement in itself. The title alone \u2014 drawn from the everyday, the tools of the table \u2014 suggests an artist thinking about what it takes to eat, and who gets fed, in an industry that has changed enormously since he last made a full record.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It also arrives at a moment when British rap’s influence on American hip-hop has never been clearer. Grime’s sounds, slang and styles are part of the global vocabulary now, and Skepta is one of the figures who made that possible \u2014 a pioneer whose influence runs through artists on both sides of the Atlantic. A new Skepta album is not just a record for his fans. It is a reminder of where much of modern rap’s energy comes from, and of the scene that never went away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For fans, the next step is simple: listen. “The Fork and Knife” is out now, and however it lands \u2014 as a classic, a curiosity, or somewhere in between \u2014 it is the sound of one of the most important voices in British music returning to the format that made him. Seven years is a long time to wait for a solo album. Skepta has made the wait feel worth it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Skepta returns with “The Fork and Knife,” his first solo album in seven years \u2014 the grime architect’s long-awaited return to the format that made him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":225,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","video_url":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_hide_featured_image":false,"_jetpack_featured_image_duplicate_dismissed":0,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/hiphopstories.media\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/11\/skepta-ig-scaled.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hiphopstories.media\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hiphopstories.media\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hiphopstories.media\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hiphopstories.media\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hiphopstories.media\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=193"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/hiphopstories.media\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":257,"href":"https:\/\/hiphopstories.media\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/193\/revisions\/257"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hiphopstories.media\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/225"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hiphopstories.media\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=193"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hiphopstories.media\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=193"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hiphopstories.media\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=193"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}