Release Date: Nov 8, 2010
Genre(s): Electronic, Club/Dance
Record label: Virgin
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London-based grime collective Roll Deep appeared to have joined So Solid Crew on the U.K. urban scrapheap after their 2005 album, In at the Deep End could only reach number 50. However, thanks to the successful solo career of their most prominent member, the self-proclaimed Godfather of Grime, Wiley, they're now enjoying an unlikely commercial comeback.
There’s few more tiresome mantras in music than equating the first taste of commercial success with ‘selling out’. However, now and again something comes along that just forces you to sit up and proclaim, “Dang! That’s some debased-ass shit!”Those first-wave grime heroes’ belated bid for wider recognition and financial stability has been a conveyor-belt of winces. Perversely fitting, then, that this gruesome era of UK urban/chart-dance hybridisation should be hallmarked by one of heyday grime’s signature names.
The underground grime crew have turned into a potent pop force. Louis Pattison 2010 As an underground group with commercial ambitions, you face a difficult hurdle: how to take an original, boundary-shifting but sometimes unpalatable sound and break it into a mass audience without spoiling the integrity of what you do in the process? It’s a hurdle that Roll Deep faced back in 2005 with the release of their debut album, In at the Deep End. A grime crew forged in the east London neighbourhood of Bow, Roll Deep have seen now-popular names like Dizzee Rascal, Wiley, Tinchy Stryder and 1xtra DJ Target rise through its ranks.