- Columbia
- 2025
"How can I be homophobic? My bitch is gay!" It's one of the dumbest rap lines in recent memory, and that's almost the point. You can hear London rapper Central Cee's shit-eating grin. He knows it's dumb, and he also knows that it's attention-grabbing and memorable. If his song "Doja" came out a few years earlier, it would've been the subject of countless tiresome thinkpieces, people arguing over how seriously to take that line. But Cench released that song in 2022, when that kind of willful ignorance was sheer TikTok bait. He knew it would work, and he was proven correct. Central Cee was already a big name in the UK rap world before "Doja," but that song was a full-on smash over there. It also found its way to American rap radio, still a vanishingly rare feat for a UK rap hit. Two and a half years later, Can't Rush Greatness is the end result -- a big-push major-label album specifically intended to turn Central Cee into a global star. It might just work.
He's charming. That's the thing. As a rapper, Central Cee can pull technical double-time moves, and he can hit different moods, but he doesn't try to get deep. He knows that's not his lane. Instead, he's all devil-may-care flash, flexing euphorically and presenting success as his destiny. He knows what he's good at. In the run-up to Can't Rush Greatness, Cench has been on a global charm offensive. He's got songs with huge international stars: Drake, Jungkook, J. Cole, Asake. He's played festivals all over the world. He's got a major label behind him, and it's giving him the budget to clear big, obvious, presumably expensive samples. He's not trying to make sweeping artistic statements. But Central Cee always sounds like himself, and the strategic push for global stardom hasn't dulled any of the giddy energy of his music. The magic of Can't Rush Greatness is that it's a big-budget event-rap album that's fun. We don't get enough of those.
Central Cee grew up in West London, the son of an Englist mother and a Chinese-Guyanese father who left when he was young. He started making music as a teenager, jumping into a chaotic and crowded London rap universe. You can hear the little-kid Cench trying to stand out on a crowded grime posse cut like AJ Tracey's 2016 "Spirit Bomb" remix, but how can one voice stand out among those chattering masses? He figured it out. When his early experiments with the UK's singsong Auto-Tuned trapwave style didn't catch on, Cench stripped the effects from his voice and went into reflective mode on 2020's "Day In The Life," the song that brought him to the UK charts. There, Cench rapped about struggling and selling drugs, but he did it with a brisk and approachable bounce. Even when he was talking about darkness, he always sounded light.
More UK hits followed: "Loading," "Commitment Issues," the PinkPantheress and American Football-sampling "Obsessed With You," all within one year. Central Cee leaned into his prettiness, proving that he was as comfortable rapping to girls as he was rapping about them. There's a commendable shamelessness to those singles. The production was always adjacent to UK drill, but he wasn't using that style to talk about scary shit. He made party music.
When songs like "Doja" started to reach the US, that shamelessness helped him stand out. The American rap landscape is still lousy with pilled-out singsong trap, with semi-improvised songs about being too high and depressed. When this guy came in with wordy fast-paced jump-around energy, people noticed. Central Cee makes perfect sense alongside his UK rap peers, and "Sprinter," his 2023 collab with fellow London MC Dave, was a blockbuster summer jam everywhere except the US. Here, a big part of Cench's appeal is in hearing him bounce off our own rap A-list. That's what we got when he and Lil Baby teamed up on "Band4Band" last year.
"Band4Band" is a blast -- not because Central Cee does anything to appeal to Lil Baby's audience but because he doesn't. On that song, the lead single from Can't Rush Greatness, Cench and Baby careen off of each other, trading off lines over a rushing, dramatic drill-style beat. In the "Band4Band" production, I hear echoes of entire generations of UK pirate-radio underground music -- garage, grime, road rap, drill. The energy forces Lil Baby out of sleepwalking mode; it might be the most alive he's been on record in a few years. Can't Rush Greatness isn't all pan-Atlantic collisions like that, but it's a durable blueprint, one that Cench replicates pretty well on the recent 21 Savage collab "GBP." 21 Savage was born in London, but he's never attacked a UK-style track like that, and the metatext of his immigration status is part of the fun.
There are other big international stars on Can't Rush Greatness, and it's fun to hear how their presence gets Central Cee to expand his sound. "Gata," his team-up with Puerto Rican star Young Miko, is a whole lot smoother than I could've expected from a grime/reggaeton fusion, and he locks into a nice singsong over a presumably-expensive sample of Ne-Yo's "So Sick" on "Truth In The Lies." There are slight variations, like the hint of Brazilian baile funk that colors in the edges of the Dave collab "CRG," but the whole record is rooted in a cohesive aesthetic. Cench understands the kind of production that works for him, and the album is full of clean, propulsive sounds -- hard-knocking off-kilter drum patterns, soft-sighing vocal-sample hums, plinky-plink harps. He'll adjust that sound to fit the mood if he's talking tough or discussing relationship drama, but he won't fundamentally reinvent it. He knows where his pocket is.
In America, this kind of sleek, pop-friendly, uptempo rap is mostly the domain of female rappers these days. Central Cee's dedication to shiny, shallow pop-rap is arguably just as single-minded as strong as that of his onetime collaborator and rumored girlfriend Ice Spice, and both of them run the risk of being too one-note to work at album length. But I like Central Cee's style. Even when he repeats himself, he makes it sing. The two men don't sound anything alike, but Central Cee's antic rat-tat-tat energy reminds me of the all-bangers all-the-time focus of young Ludacris. And just like Luda, Central Cee can rap.
Talking about recording "Band4Band," Central Cee has said that he was amazed at watching Lil Baby put his verse together -- the way he writes nothing down and freestyles melodies before turning them into words. That's the way virtually every big American rapper makes music today, but it's clearly not the way Cench works. His lines are dense and wordy, and he gets a whole lot of words into every bar. The contrast is refreshing. If I'm honest, so is the accent. Central Cee's whole approach is legible for those of us who only have a passing interest in UK rap, but it's also different enough to be interesting.
Central Cee bursts with fantastical flexes: "If it was 1930, North Carolina, I would've been Frank with the mink/ If the opps got nominated for the Brits, would've went to the ceremony with sticks, and the G-17 would've came with a switch." (The Brit Awards are a big focus: "I felt like a prick when I went to the Brits and they gave the award to a guy called Aitch/ I had my acceptance speech prepared like ‘long live F,’ I’m goin’ insane.") I like the bounce, the internal rhymes, and the way he leaves off the final word of a bar when everyone knows what he's about to say: "I sold coke to the white people in the ends, I’m glad that my hood’s diverse/ I writing a verse, and my sis told me that my niece is listening, please don’t..." It's a little thing, but it's fun.
Can't Rush Greatness isn't going to change anyone's life. If you've got no love in your heart for clean, flashy pop-rap, this album won't convince you. But it's a well-crafted, quick-moving piece of work. With this record, Central Cee takes a specific regional sound and makes it speak to the entire world. It's not easy to pull that trick off, and I love to see someone land it.
Can't Rush Greatness is out 1/24 on Columbia.
Other albums of note out this week:
• FKA twigs' EUSEXUA
• Rose City Band's Sol Y Sombra
• Benjamin Booker's Lower
• Mogwai's The Bad Fire
• Boldy James' Permanent Ink
• Harakiri For The Sky's Scorched Earth
• Anna B Savage's You & i are Earth
• Open Head's What Is Success
• Kathryn Mohr's Waiting Room
• Rebecca Black's Salvation
• Dax Riggs' 7 Songs For Spiders
• Sam Amidon’s Salt River
• Ant's Collection Of Sounds: Volume 3
• Larkin Poe's Bloom
• Dilettante’s Life Of The Party
• Wardruna's Birna
• Kawala's The Kawala Collection
• Young Knives' Landfill
• The Hellacopters' Overdriver
• Kate Campbell Strauss & Emily Mikesell's Give Way
• Cecilia Castleman's Cecilia Castleman
• Motherhood's Thunder Perfect Mind
• C Duncan's It’s Only A Love Song
• David Allred's The Beautiful world
• Ghais Guevara's Goyard Ibn Said
• Brueder Selke & Midori Hirano's Split Scale
• Slowly Slowly's Forgiving Spree
• Yahtzee Brown's You Got This
• Blacktoothed's Headway
• Titi & Ale Hop's Mapambazuko
• Risley's Umbra Penumbra
• Rhona Macfarlane's As The Chaos Unfolds
• Eric Cannata's Holding On To The Holy
• Edvard Graham Lewis' Alreet?
• Laura Cahen's De l'autre côté
• Ty Myers' The Select
• Josh Gilligan's Party Of One
• Max McNown's Night Diving
• Studio's West Coast
• Weaklung's All Problems No Solutions
• Avatarium's Between You, God, the Devil And The Dead
• Tunng's Love You All Over Again
• Jeshi's Airbag Woke Me Up
• Young Franco's It's Franky Baby!
• Bumblefoot's Bumblefoot ...Returns!
• Labyrinth's In The Vanishing Echoes Of Goodbye
• Vukovi's My God Has Got A Gun
• Shinsei Kamattechan's Danchi Thesis
• Ditz's Never Exhale
• Pierre de Bethmann's Agapé
• AJ Mitchell's As Far As The Eye Can See
• Drew & Ellie Holcomb’s Memory Bank
• taffy's Lull
• Applesauce Tears' Balcony Confidential
• Jordan Adetunji's A Jaguar’s Dream
• Charm School's Debt Forever
• Big Richard's Girl Dinner
• Canaan Smith's Chickahominy
• TUKAN's Human Drift
• Evan Westfall's Is This Our Exit?
• Kane Brown's The High Road
• flipturn's Burnout Days
• Teddy Swims' I’ve Tried Everything But Therapy (Part 2)
• Eric Clapton's Meanwhile
• Jeannie Piersol's The Nest anthology
• Hootie & The Blowfish's The Atlantic Years 1994-2003 box set
• Boilermaker's Not Enough Time To Get Anything Halfway Done box set
• Iggy Pop's Live At Montreux Jazz Festival 2023
• Thin Lizzy's Acoustic Sessions
• USA/Mexico's Live In Paris
• JoJo's NGL EP
• High.'s Come Back Down EP
• Oni's Genesis EP
• Minor Conflict's Parallels EP
• Papa Jupe's T.C.'s Jupe In The Flesh EP
