Skepta returns after seven years with The Fork and Knife – and a message

Skepta releases his sixth album, The Fork and Knife, next week – 33 months after it was first announced on 1 January 2024, and seven years after his last solo record, 2019's Ignorance Is Bliss.

The 44-year-old Tottenham MC, born Joseph Adenuga, sat down with the Guardian at his West End studio, where over five minutes of conversation he solved a Rubik's Cube sitting on the coffee table. "I can't be perfect," he said, pulling a black Arc'teryx beanie down over a furrowed brow. "But I can be conscious."

"This album has been winding me up," he admitted. "But I think I've actually made something here that is what the people want from me."

What does the album sound like?

The Fork and Knife runs to 15 tracks and is, in Skepta's own description, not a full-on conscious manifesto but a fuller sound enhanced by the wisdom of age. It ranges from Chippie, a zouk-flavoured R&B collaboration with French-Malian star Aya Nakamura, to Belly, a fierce eight-minute grime track packed with guest verses from a younger generation of MCs – north-west Londoner Kibo in particular shines through.

The new stars open the songs. The closing verses belong to Boy Better Know members JME, Frisco and Skepta himself, who balance new lyrics with classic old-school punchlines in a nod to their roles as elder statesmen.

The clearest window into his state of mind is Revenge, a memoir of mid-career missteps, redemption and resilience after 20 years in music. "It was 2008 when I lost my way … I fucked up the greatest run," he spits, referring to a period when his reputation as king of the grime underground was clouded by mainstream dalliances.

What does the new single say about immigration?

His recent single Innocent Smile, featuring Suggs of Madness and breakbeats from Chase and Status, is his answer to the question of what to use his voice for now. "Don't ask what happened to my innocent smile," he raps. "Ain't no love for an immigrant child." The first verse alone references Oasis, J Hus and Mobb Deep, criticises MPs' scapegoating of immigrants and celebrates his parents' journey "from Nigeria to Meridian" – Meridian Walk, the Tottenham estate where he grew up.

The choice of Suggs was deliberate. Skepta showed a two-tone neck tattoo he got 14 years ago. "I've always loved that movement," he said, recalling his father, a DJ who came to the UK in the ska era and played vinyl at home while skinheads and family friends gathered. "A British outlook is a universal one," he said. "All our kids are mixes of different cultures. Even my parents: my mum's Igbo, my dad's Yoruba, and in Nigeria, they're not supposed to mix, they've had wars together. But they came to England, met each other, fell in love and had me."

He was direct about the current political climate. "This whole ignorance towards immigration at the moment is horrible. It's not British. We know who it is when we open the door to the Uber: it's just people here trying to work."

What was the Gas Me Up controversy?

In January 2024, Skepta apologised after the artwork for the single Gas Me Up (Diligent) showed men with shaved heads, one with "GAS ME UP" tattooed on his skull – an inadvertent evocation of the Holocaust that caused consternation. He had intended to draw on 1980s British youth culture, the same wellspring as the Suggs collaboration, recalling how his father DJed at east London parties "where Black people and skinheads used to link up".

He vowed "to be more mindful going forward". Today the issue frustrates him, but his message stands: "We're still definitely British, definitely multicultural, definitely two-tone. This is an important part of my British story."

Also in 2024, he apologised for his 2022 contract with Puma, a brand on the BDS campaign's boycott list for sponsoring the Israel Football Association. "I've realised it's a lot more than reading the small print," he wrote. "[You've] gotta do your due diligence … I am forever a student."

Pressed on it, he said: "I'm from Nigeria, innit. I've spoken about injustices in Nigeria all my career; we see injustices in Sudan, Congo, Palestine, everywhere. And I'm not at the point where I'm doing it for money – I don't think I've ever done it for money."

How has he survived where peers fell away?

Skepta's career has repeatedly defied received wisdom. In 2007, when almost everyone had given up on grime – the scene shut out by the industry and shut down by the Metropolitan police's Form 696 risk assessments – he insisted: "I believe that we don't have to change grime to make anyone buy it. People are running away from grime thinking it's not working, but they're sellouts, man. That's why Boy Better Know is easily going to be the best thing in grime."

Since 2016's Mercury-winning Konnichiwa, with the hits That's Not Me and Shutdown, awards and sold-out shows have followed. This August he played to vast crowds on the main stages of Reading and Leeds.

His ambition now reaches beyond grime's codes. He cites Jamiroquai, the Bee Gees and Oasis as models. "My aim every time I go into the studio is to make songs that are as big as Wonderwall," he said. "I even think about things that Shakespeare wrote that we still use now. It's always been my mission to make classics."

That global instinct dates to late-2000s club tours with dubstep DJs Plastician, Mala, Benga and Skream, when a Prague show taught him that London slang "wasn't making sense" abroad. "If you want to be a world rapper, you need to think of words that the world can say with you," he said. "Maybe I'll get Liam Gallagher to come in on the next album and play some maracas."

He balances it all – music, the Mains fashion label, his 2024 short film Tribal Mark, the Big Smoke festival, the Más Tiempo house project – while recently moving out of London with his family. He took his four-year-old son back to Meridian Walk to show him his humble origins. "He didn't give a fuck," Skepta said, laughing. "He's only four! He's looking at me like, 'Dad, can we go and get ice-cream?'"

"I'll never forget the junior that used to sit on the wall in Meridian, swinging his legs," he added. "I won't do him dirty."