Skepta Returns After Seven Years: The Fork and Kitchen Span Decades

Skepta has released The Fork and Knife, his first album in seven and a half years — and it arrives 34 months after he first announced it in January 2024.

The record opens with "Secrets of Patriarchy," a track that deliberately echoes Dizzee Rascal's 2002 debut single "Sittin' Here." That song, released twenty-three years ago, gave many listeners their first encounter with grime: sinuous keys, tin-rattle snares and whirring sirens that painted, in the reviewer's words, "a hypnotic picture of urban ennui."

Skepta borrows the same icy palette and sparse arrangement for a different account. Where Dizzee's opener told "the same old story" of kitchen-sink drama and waiting for something to happen, "Secrets of Patriarchy" flits through the studios, appointments, fashion shows and family life of a man with demands on his time — but ultimately in control of his own destiny.

What does the album actually do?

According to the review, The Fork and Knife is "clear-eyed and bold" in moving beyond grime's now-established templates. Instead, Skepta curates a mural spanning three decades and more of Black British music, telling "a modern story of an immigrant family flourishing in spite of all odds and expectations."

The delay may be no accident. Skepta has suggested in interviews that the long gestation reflected a pursuit of perfection — or the weight of having to say something worth hearing. As the review notes, when your audience has inadvertently become mums you might bump into on the school run, the pressure is heightened.

A slow start that earns its place

The opening quarter does throat-clear. Skepta retreads familiar greazy grime rhythms and bouncy, A$AP-adjacent rap flows on "Cold Shower" and "Currency," moving carefully, as the review puts it, in "eggshell steps." It takes a little time for things to get going.

But those nods to past output begin to make sense as the album unfolds. Skepta starts, in the reviewer's phrase, "to join the dots of a varied and storied career" — the early grime architecture, the fashion-world detours, the family life now placed at the record's centre.

The source review carries no score, which limits any verdict on how the whole record lands beyond its opening stretch. What is clear is the ambition: an album less interested in proving grime's viability — that battle was won with 2003's Boy in da Corner and its successors — than in mapping where a grime founder stands two decades on.

Whether the seven-and-a-half-year wait pays off across the full tracklist is a question the source leaves open; what it establishes is that Skepta is no longer writing from the sidelines, but sketching out his own lot.