At least twice in his career, Blanco has been on the frontline of a massive cultural shift in UK music. First, with the rest of his Harlem Spartans cohorts in the earliest days of drill’s formative years, and then when he went solo and surprised everyone with a project — City Of God—that swapped sliding 808s for Baile funk.

Blanco, now 23, was exploring his tastes at a time when grime faded out of view and the most exciting new music, at least in his eyes, was coming from across the pond where names like 50 Cent and T.I. were setting pace in the rap world.

In his mid teens, he heard of a local youth club in Kennington where you could record music for free. Along with Bis, Zeeko and a few other Harlem Spartans, he would head down every Friday and start formulating what would become the "Harlem" sound. Those early days had a big impact on Blanco, and not just because it gave him practice recording music. “At the youth club, you weren’t allowed to swear in your music,” he says. “that’s why I don’t really swear on my songs now because when I was recording back then, no one was swearing.”

Blanco’s first project, 2021’s City Of God, was a landmark moment in UK drill. Although not really drill at all, it was a truly unique piece of work from one of its founding fathers. As underground drill shifted and a new wave of incomers began to transform it into the chart-conquering mainstream phenomenon it is today, Blanco was letting the world know that things had changed.

Now there’s a new project on the way and it’s not necessarily a sequel to City Of God. “City Of God had a concept,” he explains. “This one kinda has a concept, but at the same time, these are songs that I’ve put together. I don’t like to call my releases mixtapes or albums, I just call them projects. But if I had to pick, I’d say City Of God was more like an album and this one sounds more like a mixtape.”