K-Trap

London artist K-Trap has long been a face of the city’s pioneering drill rap scene, but he spent the first years of his career shrouded in anonymity, rocking a balaclava to conceal his identity. It’s a decision he addressed on his diaristic 2024 album SMILE?, which features an introduction in which a therapist asks him about his career. She questions: “How does that feel to know you’ve let go of the past and you can live off of just your music now? Is that why you took the mask off?” Throughout SMILE?, K-Trap answers this question with knowingness and a powerful self-awareness. It wasn’t always so easy for him, though. On 2020’s Street Side Effects, he wonders if he can ever truly shed the streets that hardened him. On the title track, he asks: “What's it like for a trapper with a silent T/That's got people waiting for more besides the scene?” To hear the development from this uncertainty to the man he is on SMILE? is to marvel alongside the fictional head-shrinker on that album: “Look at who you've become now. That person feels like a lifetime ago.”