The London-based artist David Omoregie, who performs mononymously as Dave, is a clear-minded lyricist and a trenchant community correspondent. Born in Brixton and raised in Streatham, he has spent the past few years establishing himself as one of the première writers in U.K. rap, becoming one of the most decorated along the way, winning the Mercury Prize and the Brit Award for Album of the Year for his full-length début, 2019’s “Psychodrama.”
Dave has always rapped confidently, yet in a somewhat conflicted tone, as if he were a conscientious ruffian making the best of bad options. On “Picture Me,” from his early EP “Six Paths,” he imagined alternate life paths that ended with his death or delinquency. Ultimately, he predicted the course that he’s on: “Picture me, twenty-three, a bag of sold-out shows / I made it out with music, I took all my bros.” In his teens, he developed a reputation for delivering acerbic social commentary, with tracks such as “Question Time,” a polemic that challenged Prime Minister Theresa May on N.H.S. budget cuts and the Grenfell Tower fire. The raps were pointed but often overloaded. It wasn’t until the 2018 single “Hangman” that Dave grasped his sound: a patient, pronounced wordplay that unspools into recesses of plaintive instrumentation.
Dave has ducked the negative commercial ramifications that often come with being dubbed a “conscious” rapper. Indeed, he’s been careful to avoid such a fate. In “Psycho,” he observed, “I could be the rapper with a message like you’re hoping / But what’s the point of me being the best if no one knows it?” He’s managed the balance between being an inquisitor and a hitmaker well so far: six of his songs have gone platinum. His ascent to rap stardom, coupled with a bout of writer’s block during lockdown, has yielded “We’re All Alone in This Together,” a sophomore album that lives up to its predecessor by playing off it. Dave assesses the fame that his début granted, and also its psychic costs. More people are in his orbit, many of whom are telling him he’s a special talent—which can be both a consolation and a source of alienation.
The rapper pulled the title for “We’re All Alone in This Together” from a FaceTime conversation with the composer Hans Zimmer. The music does carry vaguely cinematic flourishes, but Dave has described the project as less conceptual and more “canon,” signalling a broader canvas for his lyrics. His first album was a plea to be heeded. These songs find him in a different place: rich and successful, widely recognized and critically acclaimed. With everyone paying attention now, Dave rattles off revelations from his new perch, his personal questions opening out onto broader critiques of British society. He has always been self-assured, even under dire circumstances, but there is a noticeable uptick in his flexing, on songs such as “Verdansk” and “Clash.” As the album goes on, this stance is revealed to be performative, his achievements a cover for self-sabotage: “I just want my flowers while I’m here / So I can put them at the front of the grave that I’ve been diggin’ myself,” he raps.
Though the album pulls in more guest rappers, diverting from the closed-door, chaise-lounge meditations of “Psychodrama,” the emphasis for Dave is still on the aloneness rather than the togetherness—the ways that systems isolate us from one another, and the ways we isolate ourselves despite the underlying traumas that we share. Dave is no stranger to soliloquy—it’s one of his most compelling modes—and in these dense verses he wrestles with his own shortcomings and works through becoming more emotionally available. Even his most macro deliberations about the fissures in British society circle back toward understanding his own experience as a “young, Black, belligerent child of an immigrant” turned sudden bankroller.
Like the rapper J Hus and the Afro-fusionist Burna Boy before him, Dave taps into the music of the African diaspora to examine the division of a people—more specifically, the constant dissociation of growing up as a West African outsider in Britain. Dave’s typical downcast piano music, which he co-produces with his collaborator Kyle Evans, is offset by more upbeat fare featuring the Afro-pop star Wizkid and the alté singer Boj. This melding of European and African artistry seems representative of an internal dichotomy that Dave is still unpacking. His “Three Rivers” scrutinizes the immigrant experience in the U.K., from the Windrush generation to Brexit, marking the intersections with meticulous scene setting. “When you’re at Heaven’s gates, what you tellin’ the Lord? / You wouldn’t even let a kid into some steadier shores / That’s a life they may never afford. / Surely you would wanna give your people chances that were better than yours, no?” he states, in closing remarks. That sentiment opens up into a suite of lively rap songs, produced by the genre-benders P2J and Jae5, that fold in Afrobeat rhythms, demonstrating the cross-pollination between cultures. Dave has never sounded nimbler than he does in these songs. “The Chinese wanna take away Naija / Most of my people, they struggle and stress / Political corruption, I rise up until there ain’t a government left,” he raps, in “Lazarus.” It doesn’t seem coincidental that he finds his collectivism while defending his ancestral home.
“We’re All Alone in This Together” crescendos into the ten-minute epic “Heart Attack,” which ties all of the album’s themes up in a tirade. Easily one of the most breathtaking songs released this year, “Heart Attack” puts forth vignettes that flesh out the truth of the album’s title, referencing knife violence and domestic violence, depicting sacrifice and betrayal, citing “Scarface” and Shakespeare. Beyond being an absolutely stunning showcase of Dave’s ability, the song is a powerful display of empathy. He raps so long—and so doggedly—that he seems to exhaust the beat. Finally, when Dave draws the song to a bracing finish, it feels like a summation of the album: “A Black yout’s more than a face on a screen, / A number on a laptop, or name on a sheet. / We got stories to tell and got places to be; / From my heart, that’s the makin’ of me.” As if to underscore the point, he gives a woman, who is believed to be his mother, the last word; she, too, tells stories of pain.
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