Story / Samuel Aponte
Unorthodox and packed with wildly creative instrumentation and samples, Nippa’s Warner Records debut “Homegrown” hinges on a deeply personal and highly technical vocal delivery.
He has plenty of smooth, classic R&B highs, but he can also catch you off guard with unusual intonations and tricky cadences, suddenly pulling his phrasing backward like a DJ scratching a record. This technique hits hardest on the title track featuring Blxst, where his voice shifts against the heavy bounce of the low end with a gritty, urban flex.
Across its nine tracks, the EP pulls freely from disparate genres to feed a chimeric R&B formula that feels deliberate and fluid. “T&C’s” shifts the mood entirely, drifting into a dreamy, vapor-adjacent chillout space that feels decidedly nostalgic yet very tough to categorize, bordering on microgenre territory even.
On the KAYTRANADA and Rance-produced “Bittersweet,” the piano chords and underlying beat constantly feel ready to break out into full-blown UK garage, maintaining a tense, dance-floor-adjacent momentum throughout.
“Just Vibe” weaves in jazz textures via piano with surprising ease and credibility, letting soft keys and loose percussion draw you in beneath his vocal lines. “Cherries Freestyle” comes off more as a postmodern hip-hop offering, stripping away linear structures for wild bar delivery.
The production roster, which also features heavy hitters like Pino Palladino and Lido, gives the record a polished, cross-continental sheen without suffocating Nippa’s North London idiosyncrasies. That connection to home remains central to the project’s inception, emphasized by the title track pulling double duty as the official soundtrack for Tottenham Hotspur F.C.’s 2026/27 kit launch.
“Homegrown” stands as an excellent exercise in pop plasticity built over flexible R&B foundations, broadening the horizons of the genre in fun, unpredictable, and surprisingly tender ways.
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