J Hus: Beautiful and Brutal Yard review | Alexis Petridis’s album of the week

At the end of last month, a series of cryptic messages appeared on electronic billboards in east London. “With da Burna. Boy you know I’m masculine,” read one. “I made a comeback as a villain & made a movie so sit back & get the Popcaan my killy,” read another. These turned out to be advance publicity for Beautiful and Brutal Yard (BABY), their announcement of the album’s guest features forming part of a lengthy, mysterious promotional campaign.

Everyone they were aimed at seemed to know straight away who they referred to, which tells you a great deal about the status of the album’s creator, J Hus, which only appears to have grown during his absence from the world of music. The east London rapper hasn’t released solo work in the three years since his chart-topping second album Big Conspiracy in 2020 and – his ability to do so held back by a spell in prison and then the pandemic – last toured in 2017: an intriguing corrective to the contemporary wisdom that an artist needs to pump out a constant stream of product lest they get forgotten about.

The electronic billboard idea was pinched from the launch of Certified Lover Boy, the 2021 album by Drake, who appears as a guest on Beautiful and Brutal Yard, and whose presence also says something about J Hus’s status: here he is on the infernally catchy single Who Told You, audibly playing second fiddle to a British rapper. Drake’s verse is a reprise of the faux-Brit style he showcased on his 2018 Behind Barz freestyle and elsewhere like a hip-hop equivalent of Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins: “Your backside is so fit.”

Already proclaimed song of the summer by this very newspaper, the breezy Afrobeats rhythm of Who Told You, an ode to the joys of dancing, is at odds with the sound of BABY’s lead single: the brooding, claustrophobic It’s Crazy, which mixes gangster bragging with J Hus pondering whether he might be possessed by Satan. The two singles delineate a curiously polarised album, which keeps flipping from bleak, raw-throated street reportage to easygoing, sun-kissed stuff that frequently sees J Hus ramping up his Gambian accent: the latter substantially outweighs the former, but there’s nothing in between. That its polarities hold together for more than an hour is partly down to J Hus’s famed adaptability, his facility to ride any beat thrown his way, but it also has a lot to do with the production.

J Hus’s longstanding collaborator JAE5 is noticeable by his absence (“If we’re not going in on certain topics, I’m not touching this project” the producer told one interviewer), but his replacements skilfully trick out the tougher tracks with attention-grabbing ideas: a sudden key change when guest CB appears midway through Cream; a musical shift that cleaves Fresh Water/Safa Kara in two; the constant ratcheting up and dialling down of tension behind J Hus’s voice on Bim Bim. Guest musicians add heft to the poppier cuts. The addition of jazz saxophonist Venna (AKA Malik Venner) to Militerian is inspired, his languid contributions underscoring the somnambulant verse by controversial Nigerian vocalist Naira Marley. So are the delicate shadings of flute and acoustic guitar on Massacre.

The live backing on Alien Girl, a laid-back but sinuous rhythm courtesy of Nigerian highlife duo the Cavemen, is so fantastic that you wish J Hus had come up with something better to stick over the top than a sex rhyme filled with strained space travel metaphors – among them, alas, puns about Uranus – and the flatly awful “She’s from Russia, I’m from Poland / She was rushin’ to jump on my pole end.” Still, you could argue that J Hus’s reputation is founded less on his lyrics than his delivery, and the latter is spectacular here, verses and choruses colliding in one relentless flow. If he’s after another huge hit to follow Who Told You, he could do worse than Nice Body, a beautifully written me-and-you-against-the-world ballad featuring Jorja Smith, the pleading vulnerability of J Hus’s verses a welcome respite from the immodest stuff about the majesty of his pole end.

But then, J Hus has a lot to be immodest about. If BABY feels more like a sharpening of his style than the innovation of his debut Common Sense – that authentically groundbreaking stew of rap, bashment and Afrobeats – it’s an exceptionally classy end product. Drake’s presence might have broken Who Told You in territories hitherto resistant to J Hus’s charms, but the album has the ability to follow through. As for Britain, no one who recognised what those illuminated billboards in Stratford were driving at is likely to come away disappointed.

This week Alexis listened to

Venna – Sicily’ Box
Malik Venner’s star turn on the J Hus album led me to belatedly check out his own work, a superior fusion of jazz, hip-hop and grime: Sicily’ Box is the perfect, recumbent summer afternoon soundtrack.