ROYAL T

Harrow, North London · b. 2007 · FARA Records

ROYAL T (Tyrese Clarke, b. 1 October 2007) grew up in Harrow, North London — the ordinary suburbs where the ambition is loud but the postcode is quiet, semis and high streets and the tube into town. A confident, quick, funny kid, he was the one always performing: freestyling on the bus, making his mates laugh, working out early that charm is a currency. He came up online as much as anywhere — a phone, a laptop, a cheap mic in the bedroom — and learned the modern lesson young: that attention is a marketplace and everyone's selling something. Rather than pretend otherwise, he decided to make that the joke and the point.

He found music through bedroom beats and melodic autotune hooks, uploaded straight to the internet. He and Sterling — a mate from just up the road in Watford — started trading verses over hard 808 beats, found their chemistry, and built a bright, catchy, knowing rap-pop out of it. His influences run the melodic, autotune-driven pop-rap wave — the glide of the US melodic-autotune lineage, the UK rap-pop crossover sound — plus a catchy, self-aware, internet-native pop sensibility. Hooks first, charm first.

On stage he's the front-man and the showman — smooth, funny, high-charm, working the crowd like an auctioneer working a room. He writes the hooks first and the bars second — “the hook is the shop window” — and can do the whole auctioneer's patter in one breath. Charming, playful, sharp.