Dizzee Rascal

Forest Gate to the Mercury, in one album

Dylan Kwabena Mills was born in Forest Gate on 18 September 1984 and grew up in Bow, raised by his mother after his Nigerian father died when he was two. The route out ran through pirate radio and the Roll Deep crew, which he helped form in 2002 while still a teenager.

Boy in da Corner followed on XL Recordings in 2003: thin, metallic synth stabs, drum patterns that landed a fraction off where the ear expected them, and a voice pitched somewhere between complaint and threat. It won the Mercury Prize with Mills aged 19, and it is still the record every subsequent grime release gets measured against.

XL returned to it on 21 July 2023 with a 20th-anniversary edition carrying fourteen previously unreleased songs — a reminder that the album has outlasted the scene it came from and most of the careers that started alongside it.

Chart years, and the long middle

Showtime arrived in 2004 and Maths + English in 2007, both keeping close to the debut's territory. Tongue n' Cheek, in 2009, did not. It pushed Mills into dance-pop and produced four UK number one singles — Dance Wiv Me, Bonkers, Holiday and Dirtee Disco — which remain, by some distance, the songs the largest number of people in a field know the words to.

The institutional recognition came in a cluster: a Brit Award for Best British Male in 2010, the Ivor Novello Inspiration Award in 2011, a slot at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics in 2012, and an MBE for services to music in the 2020 Birthday Honours.

What followed was harder to characterise. The Fifth (2013) chased the pop moment; Raskit (2017) turned sharply back towards rapping; E3 AF (2020) went home to the postcode. Don't Take It Personal in 2024 split reviewers — some heard a writer still mixing dubstep, house, garage and grime with genuine invention, others heard a fighter who had stayed in past his best rounds. An EP titled I Invented Grime sits in the same recent run, its title doing exactly the work the title suggests.

A chant from the crowd becomes a record

We Want Bass, released on 4 September 2026 through his own Big Dirtee Records, runs to fifteen tracks and about 41 minutes. The title was not his idea. As Mills told UKF, the album title is a chant that came from the crowd at his shows — started by fans, then carried around the world — and the record is dedicated to them.

The production sits mainly with White N3rd, with substantial input from Big Harry, and the album moves through house, speed garage, bassline, dubstep and straight rap rather than settling on one of them. It is built for rigs, clubs and festival slots rather than headphones, and it follows a stretch of work with bass-scene collaborators including Bou, Bad Boy Chiller Crew and Denon Reed.

The singles set the pace across the year: What U Need, So Hot and C U Dance, then All Night on 23 June 2026 with a video, which Mills performed at Boxpark Wembley during England's opening World Cup match.

How it landed

Reception has been warm rather than adulatory. Writing for theartsdesk, Ellie Roberts gave it three stars and called it a well-rounded homage to the dance music that sat alongside Mills as he made his way to the mainstream. Her praise went to What U Need for its grime instincts and disorienting basslines, to Hit The Spot and So Hot for their house lean and their 50 Cent and Nelly samples, and to Foxtrot Oscar and Muy Bien as the tracks with the widest reach.

The same review identified what has always been the strongest argument for him: energy, humour and expression, with — in Roberts's phrase — no self-importance, no taking things too seriously, yet absolutely no lack of confidence. The dissent, where it appears, tends to run the other way: that the hardcore tracks so comprehensively outrun the sex-and-swagger ones that the record starts to repeat itself before it finishes.

Commercially, the position is steady rather than ascendant. He is playing academies and city halls in Britain, not arenas, and the touring case rests on a back catalogue that reliably fills a festival field at four in the afternoon.

The 2026 campaign

The year was built around the album's release. The summer went on British festivals — a main-stage afternoon slot at Boardmasters at Watergate Bay in August, Y Not, and one of the coveted Saturday afternoon slots at Victorious in Portsmouth on 29 August, where a local review had him doing his best to steal the weekend with fun and bass.

Album week itself was deliberately small and physical: a We Want Bass pop-up at Unlocked Shoreditch on 4 September, where he was on stage from 9.10pm to 10.10pm, then in-store performances and signings at Rough Trade Bristol on 9 September and Rough Trade Liverpool on 10 September, the latter running through Foxtrot Oscar, VIP and Bonkers.

The headline run is long. Europe takes 28 September to 21 October across the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, the Czech Republic, Croatia, Poland, Denmark, Sweden and Finland. Ireland and the UK follow from 27 October at the National Stadium in Dublin and 28 October at Cork City Hall, then Leeds O2 Academy (30 October), The Empire in Middlesbrough (31 October), Glasgow O2 Academy (2 November), Aberdeen Music Hall (3 November), Manchester Academy (5 November), Leicester O2 Academy (6 November), the Kasbah in Coventry (7 November), O2 Academy Oxford (9 November), O2 Academy Bournemouth (10 November), Winter Gardens Eastbourne (12 November) and Norwich on 13 November. That tour was announced on 22 June 2026, with a mailing-list presale on 24 June and general sale at 10am on 26 June.

The southern hemisphere closes the year: Perth HPC on 26 November, Eatons Hill Outdoors in Brisbane on 28 November, Hindley Street Music Hall in Adelaide on 1 December, the Royal Botanic Gardens in Melbourne on 4 December, the Sydney Opera House Forecourt on 5 December, the Beach Hotel in Byron Bay on 6 December and Shed 10 in Auckland on 8 December. Example and ArrDee travel with him; the Australian DJ Swaglord Savannah opens every date. Tickets went on general sale at 1pm on 9 July after Live Nation and Mastercard presales the previous day.