slowthai’s ‘toaster’ video is a bittersweet homecoming

The title of Slowthai’s latest album, Nothing Great About Britain, seems even more fitting now that Boris Johnson — the U.K.’s answer to Donald Trump — has been made the prime minister of the nation already blemished by the nationalist/xenophobic fervor that fueled BREXIT. The Northampton MC is punk to his core; from his disrespect for the crown on the album’s title track (“Only if you respect me a little bit Elizabeth, you cunt”) to the police he rails against on “Toaster” (“Authorities that I can’t hear/ You can’t come in, no pigs in here/ Warrant outstanding more than a year).

What could have been a dramatic rager of a visual for “Toaster” is instead an emotional stroll down memory lane as Slowthai visits his childhood home in Lings, Northampton to reminisce about his youth. Less of a traditional music video and more of a verité mini-doc with sporadic bursts of lyrics throughout Slowthai talks about everything from unsuccessfully trying to convince his mother that he was too sick to go to school as a kid to the bittersweet memory of to playing with his little brother who passed away shortly after his first birthday. By the end of the video, Slowthai is almost in tears and we leave with a better understanding of the experiences that made the man who he is.