More than 10 years may have passed between the seventh instalment of the Skreamizm series and this eighth part—but that wasn’t a sign that Croydon DJ/producer Oliver Jones, aka Skream, had lost his famously prolific work rate. “I made about 800 records during lockdown,” he tells Apple Music, “so I guess it’s still there.” The Skreamizm EPs have always been about capturing a moment in time. Skream originally made a dubstep-focused collection that he thought might be the eighth release in the iconic solo series, but scrapped it after realising he was just retreading old ground. There was nothing new to discover there. Instead, he looked for a way to channel both his immediate creative spark and the vast, decades-long span of his musical influences. “I call this a retrospective record,” he says. “Not because it sounds like anything I’ve done before, but because it’s influenced by everything I’ve been involved in.” The result is a taut tapestry that connects the threads of his formative roots in UK garage, grime and dubstep, his globetrotting house and techno career, and the jungle, rave and UK hardcore tunes that first caught the ear of an eager, teenaged Skream as he thumbed through stacks of records in Croydon’s Big Apple Records shop. Here, Skream runs through some of the memories and moments that went into the making of Skreamizm 8—his most personal collection to date. “HIT” “I started this in Devon Analogue [recording studios in Exmoor]. I did a session there during lockdown: You go there for a week, and you’re on your own. Lockdown was a really crap time, but I fell in love with the studio again. I had this massive folder of tracks, but ‘HIT’ was the first one that I thought, ‘This could be an intro to something.’ It just hit, it clicked, and it was what started the idea of Skreamizm 8 being a thing.” “Funky Sailor” (with TRIM) “I’m obsessed with merging styles, mixing styles—maybe they don’t work, maybe they do. With this, I was going for a UK funky, grime, Afro sort of mix. I posted the instrumental track on my Insta, and was like, ‘I can hear someone on this, who do you think?’—asking the punters to suggest MCs. [London MC] TRIM messaged me and he said, ‘I will deal with that.’ He’s such a great writer, he featured on Skreamizm Vol. 6 too. So I sent it to him and, 24 hours later, ‘Funky Sailor’ was made. When I started it, I called it ‘Funky Sailor’ because, with the oboes, I could picture a load of sailors dancing all over the place. And it just stuck. I could’ve called it something cooler, but it just stuck.” “The Flute Track” “This was initially a collaboration with [London electronic and funk duo] Franc Moody. They feature on the track, playing the guitars. Again, there’s many influences. The flutes sound like an old hip-hop sample, the bass is like a grime bass. The drums, I guess, are indie. It’s just one of those sweet spots when I’m trying to string things together and it really clicks. In the demo, the grime bass is a lot more predominant. As soon as they started laying the guitars on it I was like, ‘This is what I’m looking for!’ That was the bit I couldn’t do in my head. You kind of need to be in the room together. If you do stuff like that online then basically people send back what you send them: They just replay your riff. Sometimes you miss really great juicy bits when you’re not in the room.” “Not Ready Yet” “‘Not Ready Yet’ was made the night that I find out that a mate, a brother of mine, [house producer/DJ] Jamie Roy, had passed. When I found out, I locked myself in the studio. I didn’t want to talk. I was with my missus and with my best mate, who was also close with Jamie. This was one of three tracks that got made that night, all in a similar vein. I don’t even remember making the song, I don’t remember making anything that night because it was just trauma. It’s melancholy. I found the vocal and it just made sense. Well, it must have made sense because it’s on there. But it’s hard to say, because I have no memory of making it.” “Wierd Minimal” (with Bklava) “It’s spelt wrong on purpose! I’ve probably had about a hundred correction emails about that. I can spell! I just liked it because it’s the word ‘weird’ spelt weirdly. It’s very much a nod to 2001-03 El-B and Horsepower and Zed Bias in the way the step is. That’s the sort of rhythm that me and Benga used to write with when we first started making tunes at 12 and 13. I was really happy with it, but it was missing something. Tom Demac, who mixed the record, he’d been doing a session with [London DJ/singer] Bklava. He was like, ‘Look, I need to run it past Bklava, but I have all these outtakes that would be perfect for this.’ So he put it over the track and I was like, ‘Fuck, that’s what it was missing!’” “My Body” “I’m convinced this is one of the best productions I’ve ever done. It was during my grieving period [for Jamie Roy], so that’s why it’s still that melancholy vibe. A lot of the stuff that’s heavy melancholy is from around that period, even stuff that started as sketches but then really resonated with everything that happened after. It’s got that garage backbone with techno synths, and then Burial-esque vocal cuts. But it’s written in quite a positive key—a lot of Burial’s stuff was written in a very ominous key. It’s quite an uplifting track for me. Again, it’s retrospective. It’s a record of my history and my growing up. I like it because you can’t put your finger on what it actually is.” “Devon Analogue Raver” “This is the oldest tune on the record, but almost the most current-sounding. I was working on this sound called ‘eski hardcore’: using UK hardcore drums with really old eski synths and melodies—so it was like blending two staples of UK club culture. I made the whole track at Devon Analogue, it’s my favourite place on the planet, that studio. It’s become my little getaway. It’s the perfect space to make music. This song wouldn’t have been made if it wasn’t for being in that studio: all the sounds, all the synths are from there.” “Waiheke Island” (with Prospa) “It’s got a real ‘grab your mates and tell them you love them’ vibe. It’s definitely a spilling cider on your mate while you’re crying into his arms tune. When we could start travelling again [after COVID-19 restrictions had lifted] I got to [Aotearoa] New Zealand for a tour with DJ Friction, Prospa, Wilkinson and Linguistics—a good crew. [Aotearoa] New Zealand was still very much in its quarantine phase. There was another DJ, whose name I won’t mention, who didn’t follow their quarantine rules. [In December 2021, UK DJ Dimension was revealed to be the country’s first community case of the Omicron COVID-19 variant.] [Later] the whole place went back into lockdown. Me and the Prospa boys ended up staying in the same city for a bit, hanging out, and became really, really good friends and we made this tune together. After the tour we all went out on a final farewell. We got this helicopter ride over to Waiheke Island, which is the most stunning place I’ve ever been. We pitched up at this big winery, landed there in helicopters like we’re James Bond or something. It just made sense to call the tune ‘Waiheke Island’—we’d all been through so much. We were all so tight after that trip. It was the maddest thing, being right at the centre of a whole country being shut down. We weren’t part of the reason, but that’s what it felt like. It was on every news channel in New Zealand, every TV channel just went to breaking news: Omicron’s been brought in by some English DJs—but it wasn’t us!” “Your Love” (with Lagoon Wavey) “I went to Barbados years ago when my son was born and made friends with the owner of a little beach café and his wife—they’d just had a baby as well. He was a good friend with another friend of mine, who was a drum ’n’ bass producer from Manchester. Really random connection. Fast-forward 11 years, and the guy who ran the café messaged me saying he’d started looking after artists as a manager. During this period, I was making tracks like ‘Devon Analogue Raver’ and other hardcore stuff. This track was another mishmash of sounds: the bass could be from my La Roux [‘In for the Kill’] remix, the drums are back to that period from 1989-91 where people started layering breakbeats over house beats and beefing them up, and then there’s acid riffs and some grime and R&B elements—but it was missing something. I sent the track to the guy who ran the café and I got this message back with some stuff from Lagoon Wavey. His voice just fit the record. He’s got a sort of a Weeknd vibe, it’s got a lot of soul to it. The song is very chaotic, but his voice is very soothing and it glues everything together and makes it work. It’s beautiful.” “Roy the Boy” “On the same night when we found out about Jamie passing away, my friend was here. No one was talking to each other, everyone was just in shock. I was just sitting there with my head between the speakers, playing music as loud as possible. My friend was going through his voice notes from Jamie, and I heard this voice note. It’s from Jamie to my best friend Pat, and he’s talking about me. I could hear it over the beats, and so I asked him to send it to me and I mashed it into the background. It’s kind of my final nod. I’m drawing my line under grief.” “Thinking of You” “I’d recorded a voice note during the second lockdown, but it was never meant to be on a song. It was to my kids. My son was starting secondary school after being indoors for two years, and the way the world was, everything was fucked—so I was just recording a note to say that everything will seem like the biggest problem in the world, but things will end up all right. I layered it over some drums; my missus cried when she first heard it. I didn’t really want my voice on a record, so I sent it as an idea to Professor Green because he’d just had his son and I was thinking he could write one for his kid. But what he sent back was my voice note, more or less. I sent it to Annie Mac, and I also sent it to Jaime Winstone, Ray Winstone’s daughter, and she did the same: just her saying my words. It didn’t work. The more people I played the demo to, they just said it was beautiful and there was no chance anyone else could do it. It’s quite a vulnerable record, but it’s been the one I’ve probably played out most in my sets as a closer. I’ve had people message me [going] through so many different situations, whether it be their parents getting divorced, or friends committing suicide, or similar messages, and it was resonating with so many people. It’s honest, I guess. I guess people like honesty, don’t they—and reassurance.”