Having already reached Number 2 in the Myspace UK Unsigned Music chart, and appeared on Channel AKA’s Streets, Grime, and Life compilation CD, West London’s Kay 2 & The Strange Days have proved themselves more than ready to drop their debut mixtape, The Strangest Day…

The material on The Strangest Day offers a real soundscape, the rapping sometimes fading into a background of atmospheric synth, samples, and distortion that wouldn’t sound out of place played by an Indie Rock/Pop band. Kings and Queens opens the drop, and already the light beat occasionally disappears under a weight of echoing piano, vocals, and electric guitar. “We don’t know where we’re going to stay,” the chorus admits, the vague distorted sounds more than reflecting a sense of drift.

The tone is the same throughout. More echoing synth underscores tracks like Care In The World, Let Myself Go, Spliff Got Me Floating, and When The Darkness Has Gone, with its eerie Ain’t No Sunshine sample. The Mist has some of the darkest sounds on the album, with plucked strings, a childish female vocal hook, and a resonant beat that can hardly keep going. There’s variation too, with sparser-sounding tracks, like the strangely touching Live To Let You Shine. Some more upbeat numbers feature: Hard To Say is driven by a fast-paced Reggae beat, whilst Can’t Skate is a comic, synth electric organ infused account of skating failure.

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The album gives a unique vision of urban life: weed-blazing, and disaffected, Kay 2 & The Strange Days occasionally sound like a gawky hip hop (ish) take on The Smiths. Although some of the conventional rap subject matter is here – aspirations, drug-taking, street experience – it’s all relayed with a hazy kind of listlessness. “When the routine bites hard, and ambitions are low,” sings the female vocalist on Feeling Worlds Away hook, and the sense of slowed ambition and cynicism appears throughout the album.

The Strangest Day is an impressive and fascinating debut mixtape, ensuring that Kay 2 & The Strange Days establish a distinctive sound and style. Sometimes, the ethereal, floating quality of the tracks makes them hard to distinguish from one another, but, given that this is a mixtape, and not a more tightly-constructed album drop, contrasts and relationships between tracks seem less important. Overall, the mixtape is a great entry into the industry, and really is like nothing you’ll have heard before.

To download the mixtape, visit http://www.kay2music.com

Release date: November 28

Track list:

Kings and Queens 3:12
Let Myself Go 2:26
Feeling Worlds Away 3:41
Care In The World 3:42
Foreground 4:08
The Plot (Black Jack) 4:12
Live To Let You Shine 4:12
Interlude 1:11
When The Darkness Has Gone 4:38
Ondine 5:57
Spliff Got Me Floating 3:26
Hard To Say 2:07
People Are Strange 2:01
Nightmare (Black Jack) 3:29
Dreamers 2:21
The Mist 3:45
Cast Sunlight 2:50
TATE Freestyle (BONUS) 2:00
Cant Skate (BONUS) 2:47
We Know (BONUS) 3:58

Words by Fiona Guest