Mark Dempsey

Birmingham, UK (Kingstanding / Digbeth) · b. 1998 · FARA Records

Mark Dempsey (27) is from Kingstanding, in north Birmingham — a large, ordinary, working postwar estate that the city itself barely markets, and now lives in Digbeth, the creative, industrial-turned-arts quarter closer to the centre. Music came at him from two directions that never met growing up: Sunday Mass at St Margaret Mary's with his nan, where hymn call-and-response was the first structure he ever internalised, and the club his dad worked the door of for twenty years, where he heard the sub-bass rattling the car on the drive home before he was old enough to be let inside. He found his way in through MCing — garage and grime over other people's beats from his mid-teens, the direct, talk-straight-at-you register that never left him even once he started singing. The record itself comes from the far side of a couple of genuinely difficult years he only ever describes flatly, as “the damage” — no further detail offered and none needed. He built the first version on a secondhand controller in an unheated Digbeth box room, singing under his breath so the neighbours wouldn't hear the words.

An MC's instrument used to sing rather than spit — forward, raw, slightly cracked, pleading without ever trying to be pretty, with falsetto adlibs pushed past comfortable at the peaks. The cracks stay in on purpose; polish would undercut the confession. He phrases like someone talking rather than performing, which is exactly what the garage and grime background gives him. His influences run UK garage and grime MCing for the delivery, gospel and hymn call-and-response for the structure of the “again... again...” refrain, and the festival piano-house and EDM-pop tradition for the architecture — dark and sparse under the verse, enormous and bright at the drop. He thinks of the dance floor as a place you can confess in at full volume and still be forgiven.

Direct and unguarded in a way that surprises people expecting festival-pop polish — he talks about “the damage” flatly, without self-pity and without detail, and lets the song carry what he won't explain in an interview. He learned the “again... again...” refrain's shape at Sunday Mass with his nan before he ever thought about writing a chorus. He grew up hearing the club before he was old enough to go inside it, which he says explains more about his music than anything else does. He built the demo on a secondhand controller in a box room, singing quietly enough that the neighbours never heard the words that later filled a festival field. Direct, unpolished, sincere.