Lancey Foux only eats one meal a day. “It helps your energy levels and your focus,” the rapper explains, breaking his fast over a plate of sushi in Roka in central London. His biceps bulge out of his tight-fitting blue polo shirt and, even sitting down, his six-foot-four frame towers above me. “I’m training hard at the moment and fasting keeps me going – I can only train on an empty stomach.”
This regimented lifestyle lands in stark contrast to the high-flying hedonism usually depicted in Lancey’s music. Breaking through in the mid-2010s with his punched-in, auto-tuned rap lyrics about partying the world over and racing supercars with supermodels, Lancey was an early glimpse into the digital maximalism that defines UK rap today. He bridged the grime scene with the global internet generation that followed, combining early mentorship from UK veteran Skepta with the influence of rage rap contemporaries like Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert in the States.
But, having recently turned 30, life looks a little different for Lancey now. To the likes of Jim Legxacy, N4t, Finessekid and more – a new crop of UK rappers taking taking his genre-diffuse experimentations to new heights – Lancey is now the mentor, and these days his time is strictly divided between running his own label, Cultcaine Records; hosting his own club night, Club Blue and, apparently, keeping on top of his health in the gaps between. It is through adjusting to these new responsibilities that Lancey arrived at his long-awaited eighth album, The Time of Our Lives, which, after over two years of delays, releases next month.
“I think your 20s are heralded as this period where you can have fun and fail and not take yourself seriously – the seriousness comes at 30,” he explains of his mindset going into the project. “When I was writing this, I had just finished [2023’s] BACK2DATRAP album and I always knew my next album would be called The Time of Our Lives. Initially, it was just fun, pure euphoria, but the reality is: nothing’s ever really all fun. Me being in my thirties now, looking back at my twenties, I started to question: ‘Did I actually have a good time or not?’ Over the last two years, it gradually became apparent that there was a question mark at the end of the title.”
The Time of Our Lives traces this journey. Originally taking the name ‘Foux’ (a misspelling of ‘false’ in French) to refer to the larger-than-life character embodied in his music, the first half of the new project revels in the digital overload that first made Lancey a cult hero. “Oooh somebody save me, too many sexy ladies,” he raps on today’s single “Rockstar Rider”, backed by melodies distorted like the blur of streetlights from a sports car at full speed. But, by the project’s mid-point, the façade begins to slip. He reckons with his vices, confesses that he feels “dead inside”, and, on confessional track “Therapist”, even comes face-to-face with the true Lancey behind the ‘foux’.
“Speaking and being seen – being visible – was a big problem for me. I avoided it for so long and I still do. I’m very comfortable living my life in the shadows”
“‘Therapist’ is a very real song,” he tells me, picking his words carefully. “I was going through something and somebody was urging me to go to therapy with them, but I denied it. I was like, ‘It’s a bunch of bullshit, I’m not doing it’. I ended up going with them but I didn’t take it seriously, I just lied. As time went on, I realised that I was out of my mind. I should talk to someone, but I won’t. I’m so out of my mind, in fact, that if I see a therapist, they’re going to become a part of my circus… It’s a crazy way of thinking, but I love that song for how real it is.”
“Around the time of [2024 album] Conglomerate, there were a lot of changes I wanted to make, both in my life and my career,” Lancey continues, later describing TTOOL as “the last time you’ll hear me in the way you know right now”. “This album is what I wanted to do. Speaking and being seen – being visible – was a big problem for me. I avoided it for so long and I still do. I’m very comfortable living my life in the shadows, but this was me coming out of my comfort zone. I realised that it’s cool to let people into your world. No matter what you think of yourself, you’ve got to let people take you for what you are.”
In addition to Lancey’s personal struggles, however, the Conglomerate album also marked a turning point in UK music as a whole. If Lancey’s early career provided a glimpse into UK Ug maximalism, then that project was the moment it materialised. Recorded in collaboration with then-underground rappers Len and Fimiguerrero, Conglomerate codified the signature distortion and Atlantic-bridging rap sonics that, in the year following, would make global celebrities out of the likes of EsDeeKid, fakemink and Sinn6r. Still, Lancey is keen to downplay his part in the project, pointing out that his vocals only appear on five out of its 13 tracks and emphasising that his role was more as an executive producer and mentor rather than the face.
“In the overground – or, whatever you want to call it – I’m one of the oldest ones,” Lancey explains. “I understand history and I think it’d be wrong of me not to contribute to the community, or teach what I’ve learned to keep it going. Hip-hop in America has been documented for 50 years, but our rap community is still fairly young, we’re about 20 years behind them. You have to do your best to pass things on.”
“I came up off the back of grime being big, when everyone was insistent on everything being strictly UK, but I always saw the world as one,” he continues. “I grew up watching American TV shows, English TV shows, African movies, Chinese movies… I never thought that I should be limited to any sound because of where I’m from. I’d bend the way I say certain things because I liked how Nicki Minaj did it, or say something even more English because I liked how Giggs said it. 10, 12 years ago, the UK wasn’t necessarily very supportive of that, but I think that’s exactly what a lot of these new kids are doing now.”
“Our rap community is still fairly young, we’re about 20 years behind America. You have to do your best to pass things on”
There’s an unmistakable pride in how Lancey speaks of the UK rap scene today. “They’ve got it all figured out,” he tells me, referencing the stark focus on community that underpinned the recording of Jim Legxacy’s landmark Black British Music mixtape last year. “One of the first things I said to Len and Fimi is, ‘You need each other’, because I didn’t necessarily have that. Now, you have people singing for 20-30 million, but you have to decide: are you going to run away – that’s easy – or will you keep things going here?”
Perhaps a big reason why Lancey is so invested in community, then, is that he himself has faced these very questions before. Not least of all is this latest album, which has been stuck in label purgatory for the last two years. “Now that I have a record label, I have artists, I have responsibility, I understand the difficulties of the music business a bit more,” he says slowly and diplomatically when I broach the topic. “There’s a lot of people who work in music that don’t necessarily care about music. They push us away from a lot of the things we love, and a lot of the artists that we love, too. I think that’s a good place to leave it.”
With that, we wrap up our meal and Lancey gets ready to head out to some label business of his own – a launch party for his latest signing, live reggae band League of Rebelz. He resembles a proud father when he talks about the group, grinning as he relays their high ambitions of winning Grammys and how he was “blown away by their purity” when he first met them.
“Is this what the time of your life looks like now then?” I ask one last time. “I think you’ve just answered it there,” Lancey responds cryptically. “The way I looked at fun in my twenties, some of it was stereotypical. You’re searching for these great moments in parties or whatever drugs you’re taking. But now I’m at the point of like, ‘OK, I know that side of it, what does this new one look like?’ That’s the question mark.” Lancey is opening a new chapter.
Lancey Foux’s eighth album, The Time of Our Lives, releases August 28. The project’s lead single, “Rockstar Rider”, is out now.
‘ The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties ’
‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.dazeddigital.com ’
