Honour - HBK Vol 1 - Na God

Who might Honour actually be? Clues are laid out like a breadcrumb trail on their labyrinthine inaugural dispatch, initiating a bleakly cinematic narrative that’s punctuated by dub FX and obstreperous samples that lay out a life well lived. Honour infuse each gesture with screwy, confident storytelling unfurling ideas, feelings, rage - creative energies - into something abstract and yet completely focused.We open on a haze of pistol clacks, electric piano stabs, 12-bit boom bap, and submerged, barely-audible chatter. It’s a space that feels familiar but defiantly current: Honour have a command of the past, serving dream dust that’s mined from tweaky ‘90s R&B, jiggy rap, DIY culture, punk and the bits of the rave continuum that haven’t been completely rinsed by Goldsmiths interlopers, but here muffled under thick blankets of half-heard vocals and abstract noise. Beats are slowed to a Houston crawl, spliced with dizzy loops; soul and disco cuts are forced thru ferric saturations and weaved into nice ‘n sleazy chipmunked day-zero garage; trip-hop is reformed into baroque, cavernous neo-trap, driving us into darker, more politicised ends. And that’s just the first side. On the flip, Honour treats us to a recording of a US preacher improvising over jittery jazz drums. “I didn’t come here to say I just came to church, I came here to be the church,”. Those words stick in the mind like gorilla glue, radically reframing the first side’s cultural tapestry as something far more nuanced and sacred. Alongside it’s second volume, ‘HBK Vol.1: Na God’ is some of the most major material that’s appeared on our radar these last few months - providing uncompromising sonic myth-making irrespective of who may - or may not - be involved.