Music

Radical pop collective Nine8: ‘Anyone who thinks like us is part of the gang’


“I probably shouldn’t say this, but I’ve got a good feeling about tonight,” Nige tells me while waiting for a pint of Guinness. In a few minutes, the MC (real name Niall Williams) will take to the stage of London’s Jazz Cafe with the rest of the Nine8 Collective for their first live show in almost 18 months.

Tonight’s seated, socially distanced show isn’t a homecoming. The collective – left-field Gen-Z pop artists with a radically egalitarian setup – may be based in a studio in nearby Kentish Town but, according to rapper Lava La Rue (an anagram of her real name, Ava Laurel), “it doesn’t really feel like we’ve been away”, thanks to their sustained creativity during lockdown.

Instead, tonight is a chance to celebrate. Both Biig Piig (Jess Smyth) and LorenzoRSV (Lorenzo Ricardo Stanford-Vaughan) have just released EPs, it’s Laurel’s 23rd birthday, producer Mac Wetha (Lloyd Macdonald) has just signed to Dirty Hit – home of the 1975 – and it’s the first chance Nine8 have had to play tracks from 2020’s brilliant No Smoke Vol 2 mixtape. The vibe for the show is an energetic house party: there’s a sofa on stage for the members to watch each other perform, scrapbook visuals are projected overhead, and at one point Laurel nicks a shot from a table of fans at the front. On Instagram later that night, she promises to pay them back.

The spark for Nine8 came when a 16-year-old Laurel met Smyth and Macdonald at Kingston College, south west London. During their first week, a teacher failed to show up for class, so they hung out in the smoking area and quickly discovered a shared interest in music. The adjacent music room was used for freestyle jam sessions – “all very communal,” says Smyth.

The Nine8 collective.
Global mindset … the Nine8 Collective. Photograph: Daniela K Monteiro

“I wanted to be around like-minded people who wanted to create but didn’t necessarily have the resources to do so,” says Laurel. The fledgling mob created a makeshift studio in Macdonald’s bedroom (christening it Complimentary Tea Studios “because we’d always get a cup of tea from his mum”) and “the more we were swapping and sharing resources, the more we got this unified style and aesthetic”. Nine8 was created, named after the year Laurel and Smyth were born, and they started releasing experimental, lo-fi hip-hop while expanding their ranks.

Rapper Nayana Iz showed Laurel some of her music after a Grenfell fundraiser gig, while RSV played a set at Nine8’s first show. After the police shut it down (aiding early hype), the pair hung out and he “naturally became part of Nine8. It was this unspoken thing.” Those real-life connections make Nine8 an oddity in a world where scenes are often formed online, but Laurel believes there’s more longevity in it “because you really get to see that person for who they are”.

“The whole point was to have something that didn’t feel exclusive or cliquey, but actually anybody who thought like us was part of the gang,” says Macdonald. “It wasn’t anti-industry, but none of us had that industry connection.” They have upgraded their studio and there’s talk of buying a permanent space of their own, but that community-driven mindset hasn’t changed.

Every song that Nine8 have released was created by the collective in the same room. Usually someone will play a beat and whoever wants to write to it, does. “It’s chaotic but amazing,” says Smyth. “It’s a judgment-free zone where everyone gets to explore, be themselves and be vulnerable.” They do equal financial splits on everything because, even if someone isn’t featured, they were there when it was created. Choosing what gets released is decided by a vote.

“We want to make sure that the collective stays the way it started: a safe space for creatives of any age or background to come and express themselves,” says Laurel. “We’re a London collective because of where we’re from, but we’re not boxed in.”

“We have a global mindset,” Williams agrees, before getting ripped apart for just releasing a solo track called The Capital. “Everyone’s got things about them that are much broader than this one city. Nayana represents her Indian heritage, Lava and Lorenzo are Caribbean, and I have family in Ireland.” Each member is free to pursue solo recordings, too, and Smyth moved to LA last year to further her solo career. “We can’t put our lives on pause or say we’re never going to leave London – if anything, this is a chance to expand things,” she reasons, saying of logistics: “We’ll make it work, we always do.” She made sure her contract with Sony said she’s always free to continue Nine8. “I don’t feel like I would be myself without the collective.”

“Nine8 is just a house for us to come back to,” says RSV. “When the time’s right, the time’s right and we’ll hop in the studio and make more magic.” Typically for their generation, their sound is tough to pin down. In 2019, Ignant saw the likes of Biig Piig, Nige and RSV freestyle over sparse, bubbling synths with an emphasis on clever wordplay, while Shedontevenknow (2020) sees RSV, Lava La Rue and Bone Slim create a more tightly wound and urgent party track. New song Cold Hands, conversely, is influenced by New York hardcore punk band Show Me the Body and forms part of a darker, guitar-driven double A-side released last month.

For all their communal ideals, could their growing solo success pull them in different directions? “Where people get confused is that first and foremost, Nine8 is my friendship group,” says Laurel. “We’ve all got dreams of where it could go but I think it could be incredible,” adds Smyth, while Macdonald says: “We’re not scared of focusing on becoming something bigger than we are. The most important thing is that we’re all here for each other as friends. This whole thing wasn’t necessarily about being the biggest thing in the world … but we could be!”

The double A-side single Cold Hands / Gotta Get is out now



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