On the Rise
Sam Akpro

No longer living with the financial cushion of being at his parents’ home, he trades off the occasional pub shift for the relative quiet: “I’ve got younger siblings, innit.”

This is Sam Akpro at 24 in the run up to releasing his second EP, Arrival. His work up until this point has been a continual evolution, marked by his developing confidence producing music between solitary sessions on his laptop and more elemental jams with his backing band. His emergence with Nights Away was defined by texture, vocals sparsely added as just another sound competing in the mix, while 2021's Drift put expressive lyricism at the centre of a swarming industrious sound, reflecting a period Akpro himself describes as “quite blurry.” In his own words, Arrival reflects a fresh sonic palette and is less lyrica-focused. He looks to “catch the vibe,” he explains, making use of addictive grooves and repetitive phrasing and “not trying to say so much” in a literal sense.

Akpro’s journey as a musician begins to describe the eclectic musical environment Peckham gave him growing up. His work with beats and samples was inspired by friends’ hip-hop nights, and playing a guitar he bought at around 18 when he was “listening to a lot of Tame Impala”. Before that, however, he gained his first experience as a musician playing in primary school Djembe lessons, building towards participation in Peckham Carnival. In secondary school, he was then given the chance to learn violin.“[I reached] grade 2 or 3… but as you become a teenager you’re kinda like, ‘Fuck that shit,’” he laughs. Peckham as a place had a role to play in this shift. “I guess it’s being from my area”, he considers, imitating an uncomprehending “why is this guy carrying around a violin, bro?” This was “never that deep,” he insists, pointing out that there were simple other interests taking hold at that point, particularly skateboarding.

Sam Akpro songs are magnificent collages that fuse elements from all kinds of styles and eras to create something truly individual. As he understands it himself, the wide-ranging, open-minded taste that facilitated this was forged on the skate park. “Skating was where I got a lot of my musical references from… just because it was so varied. Peckham Skate Park: make sure you get that name in the article! There’s so many types of people there, middle class kids, me from the estate opposite, people that would never have met anywhere else. That’s where I met a lot of people like JADASEA and Pinty.” These slightly older creatives offered guidance and inspiration, not only as music-makers, but also as listeners.

The skate park provided a context for musical exchange, not only in association with its various patrons but also in the skate videos shared among that community. “Every skate video is by a different person and they’ve got a different taste in music,” Akpro explains. Skipping through YouTube on the new family computer, Akpro was given an unsorted guide to music history bringing him from hip-hop to Tame Impala to David Byrne. Childhood friend Finn Dove, who recently produced the video for “Trace”, cut his teeth making skate edits, leaving choice of song up to the featured skater. Akpro remembers these videos and their music, noting they “subconsciously influenc[ed] me. I would listen to a song while watching a video but then at a certain point I would be watching just to listen to the music.”

Akpro’s sound is truly modern, speaking of that digital native upbringing, with access to the entire history of music, not only on dedicated platforms like Spotify but also out of context, as was the case with those skate soundtracks on YouTube. A noisy life in Peckham further expanded his sonic palette, involving gigs, parties, and even just music blasting out of shops. All around him, friends were producing their own music out of bedrooms and school practice rooms. “A lot of successful drill artists came from my school,” he explains, while also coyly referring to black midi as “friends from BRIT school doing well making guitar music.”

It seemed worth asking whether sounding innovative was ever an end in itself. He considers, “I’d be a liar to say that I wasn’t, because you become quite savvy with what’s going on, but I’ve never tried consciously to do that.” Half-joking, he adds, “if you try to sound original, you’ll probably end up sounding like a dickhead.” He muses, “nothing is ever really original, it always comes from somewhere. Drums have existed for centuries so how can that sound original?” For Akpro, originality is “a feeling,” all about translating existing sounds to something “genuine to you.” I’m just always trying to get what I hear in my head into my speakers.” Akpro’s unique talent is his ability to do this so effectively, channelling all manner of contradictory influences into one coherent but complex track. Joy Division, Prince, Ian Dury and Alchemist were just a handful of the contrasting names he threw up as inspirations.

Though he was initially “a bit more closed off from having people putting stuff on my work,” he has come to appreciate the value of opening his work up to outsider contributions. These days, “I’ll always bring people to add stuff,” he explains, pointing to Sarah Meth’s abstracted backing vocal contribution to “Arrival” and the guitar-playing of Cameron Jacobs across his work: “my stuff wouldn’t sound the same without him on it”. This process also helps unblock the solitary madness of working alone at a laptop. “Even just sitting in another room with someone and listening to your music you start to hear it differently.”

It is so easy to get carried away on solo laptop production and drown an idea in additional layers. Akpro acknowledges that sometimes the best thing to do can be to strip something back down, “when I can’t do anything more but the song’s not finished.” He explains how at times “the whole idea changes and just one thing stays the same [from its original form]. Then you take everything away and build up again around that,” he adds, describing his songs as “everchanging” in this respect. That sense of the songs having a kind of aliveness is perhaps the best way to conceptualise their development. Though something may take a long time to finish, he continues “the best thing is when I’m unsure if I like something or not but I can’t stop listening to it. That’s when it feels like I’ve got something I should be working on.”

Akpro’s musical practice is a continuum, with releases acting as a time capsule for a certain sound. Considering what links the four tracks of Arrival, he explains that though the songs all come from a different place, what they share is a moment of final production. “They all came from different times in your life, but when they catch up to where you are now that’s what gives it that cohesiveness.” Speaking of “Trace” in particular, he feels that the core of the song has stayed the same, but “the sounds have changed, the way I’ve delivered the lyrics has changed,” responding to the changing personal relevance of the songs and to new influences, specifically Dean Blunt’s use of space in vocal delivery and J Dilla’s sampling.

The cover of Arrival poses Akpro on the rooftops of Peckham, looking out over his city with the mixture of wisdom and bewilderment that feeds his implacable music. Though his sound favours the dark and intense, he feels he is never straightforwardly disparaging about London life. “It’s not negative, it’s just me accepting the nature of this place.” Perhaps more than any other artist, the only thing we can expect from Sam Akpro is that his sound will continue to change, evolving as he goes on engaging with the sounds of London that he surrounds himself with. From the way he speaks about his process, one can imagine that even if he remade Arrival next year it could sound completely different.