Leeds Hip Hop Scene

 Northern Hostility is an ever-growing, ever-changing music collective based around Leeds, York and Huddersfield but with affiliates and collaborators around the UK. It is still in its youth, we only started this April 2007 with members of loads of different crews and collectives, such as DS Fam, Battlers, Alphabetix, Invizible Circle, Watchmen, Moulding the Breaks and others. We make hiphop and grime, aiming to cover as much ground in these genres as we can, maybe treading some new ground on the way. Diversity’s what it’s all about, music for heads with short attention spans and dark humour.

Right now the line-up goes like this: for vocalists we got Filthy Rich, Tungtide, Lip, Devalish Dialect, Slac, J. Bravo, Prys, Conflict, Matter, ABD, Angel S, Undisclosed, Nega, Mr Ris, Nomad, El-D, Instance, making the beats is Mike D, Prolific, Wisdomtooth, Mr Mowgli, Confliction, Sarantis, and our resident turntable virtuosos are Etch, SirPlus and Prolific. There’s so many different styles clashing in there the sound we go on with is just schizo. MCs range from straight up battlecats and grime spitters to abstract linguists, conscious educators and everything in between…

The themes that link this whole project together are firstly acknowledging the lack of exposure hiphop artists up north and how much harder we have to work to get any recognition. We aint bitching and whining about it though cos we know this project is not our commercial success where we sell more units than all southern acts combined, we’re just holding our heads up and doing what we do best, making sick dark underground tracks. That’s the second underlying theme: we are on some dark, menacing, grim-up-north shit here, no feel-good steez. Either big stomping dancefloor killers or downbeat schizophrenic nightcreepers, with the occasional blunted crackly horizontal rhyme exercise, that’s the only trade we deal in.

First release we’re looking at is the Bad Language Mixtape mixed by renowned Leeds turntablist DJ Sinical, featuring group tracks and tracks by each crew and member just to introduce ourselves to an unsuspecting public, then depending on the response we take it from there. We got nowt to lose and bare to gain so be on your tippytoes.

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