by Željka Marošević

The Wimbledon wordsmith’s new single comes in the form of an EP, granting fans four extra songs. But it’s a risk to release tracks that didn’t make it onto an album, and on The Man’s Machine it shows. While the single’s riotous chorus and sampling is kept in check by Treays’ swaggering voice (seamlessly rhyming kings and queens with amphetamines), there is no such balance elsewhere. The lo- fi sound which crowned his first album is replaced by over-production.

Before Treays only rapped about his friends from the street, now it appears he’s invited them into the studio to produce. What else can explain the incongruous sound effects, the jolting changes of pace and the unrelenting ska melody (on ‘Man Not a Monster’) which overcrowds most of the songs? It’s only in ‘Believing in Things...’ that we get a hint of that redeeming elegiac quality that underpins his most perceptive insights. 

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