RAP - Navigator

PRE-ORDER: EXPECTED END SEPTEMBER

Officially 2026’s busiest fella, Thomas Bush is at it again for the nth time this year, now after multiple solo albums and guest spots to be found reigniting the RAP project that he shares with Jolly Discs’ head honcho, Guy Gormley. Navigator follows a similar arc to their two previous (highly recommended) long players, an addicting mix of mordant synthpop, soundsystem dynamics, avant lo-fi folk and a marked sense of mischief. Bush often seems highly earnest when he sings, but there’s an underlying sense with RAP - check the name for a start - that there’s a little arch pisstaking hidden in the architecture. It’s a trick they share with the likes of Dean Blunt and Lolina, which is not so much pranksterism as a desire to up-end the Serious Music™ world with playful gestures and off-kilter aesthetic choices. Here, grime, 2step and IDM rub shoulders with bedroom pop, obscure samples and clunky drum presets in ways that few others would have the temerity to do but nonetheless feel entirely natural to them. The lyrics also play a key role, communicative of a very specific experience of city life, its romances and its abuses taken as one absurd whole. It’s perhaps what you’d reasonably expect ‘pop’ to sound like in 2026, and yet… here they are out there on their own. Which, really, is the true heart of Navigator and RAP in general,, a very singular operation with a magpie approach to sound and a distinct sense of north/south circular living - art school bent, but very modern London music all the same. The best album Bush has tied his name to this year? Maybe even better than that, in fact. The bar remains very high with this lot.