Interview by Edie MuskerPortrait by Talia Beale

EM To what extent do you identify as a grime artist?

MIC It depends who’s asking. I love grime music more than anything when it’s good, but I find the grime space very limited and constricting. I try to distance myself from it. I don’t tend to call what I make grime, but maybe that’s what I do. I identify with grime music as a Black British person, and that’s about it.

EM Where did the idea for your new project, the nine-track Shamtarctica, come from?

MIC I made Shamtarctica with the best producer in the world, Nammy Wams. The concept came from the idea of the “Devil Mix” [a track with the drums removed]. I wanted to make music like that from the beginning, not as if it were a song that we had taken out. There were no drums, just synths and a bit of bass. I think that’s untapped in grime. I don’t think there’s any other grime artist who has made a vocal project this long. The Devil Mix and the Angel Mix [roughly interchangeable terms] are so cool and strange. It doesn’t really exist in hip-hop. Like Antarctica, it’s an uncharted zone, a place where no one has ventured before. Other really clear things influence the project. First, I just love winter, it’s special to me. I was born in the wintertime. Second, Lil B’s mixtape Rain in England (2010) was a huge inspiration. I was blown away by it, and I wanted to make a UK version. The third inspiration for the project is climate change and the effects it will have, and is already having, on our world. My favourite thing is winter and it feels like climate change is gonna rip it from my hands.

EM Why are you releasing this ode to winter in spring?

MIC Spring is my least favourite season, and I needed to give myself something to be excited about. The project is its own world in which winter never ends. When you listen to the project, whether it’s in August or the depths of winter, the season is irrelevant. People release Christmas songs, people have even released Christmas albums. But I’ve never heard of an artist in the UK, aside from the flipping Cocteau Twins, making a whole project about winter. Their album Victorialand (1986) is so interesting. I feel like my project represents the same for me in my discography. It’s a project with less percussion; it’s all about winter. Victorialand is inspired by Antarctica, just like Shamtarctica.

EM There’s such a mythology about the poles of the earth, these relatively undiscovered spaces.

MIC They’re almost like a final frontier. When I was painting the cover, I was watching Encounters at the End of the World (2007) by Werner Herzog. It’s about Antarctica, and it was so amazing to watch. When something is so cold that humans can’t function normally, it feels like an alien world; it’s really mystical. I find it so cool.

EM What do you think of the idea that impending apocalypse is ingrained in human thought? You’ve made this climate album, but your previous albums were a disavowal of your religious upbringing. Do you think there’s a relation between the two?

MIC I romanticised Christmas a lot growing up. I couldn’t experience it because I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness. I do have a bit of a fixation with the end of the world. I wanted my other project, Cursed (2025), to feel apocalyptic, especially the last track. There are references to the Rapture throughout. I wanted it to feel dark, gloomy, anxiety-ridden and super eschatological. The difference between Cursed and Shamtarctica is that Cursed is mocking a Christian eschaton, whereas Shamtarctica is looking frankly at where the human world is going. It’s talking specifically about climate disaster and looking at it dead in the face.

EM My favourite lyric is, “People will need gills to live in ends.”

MIC I’m proud of that lyric. I was trying to create a picture of what it would look like if the world flooded. People would drown en masse. The project is supposed to be fun and happy, but obviously, there’s a bit of darkness in there. I still managed to weave in something a bit tongue-in-cheek. It’s bittersweet, maybe more bitter and not so sweet.

EM In Shamtarctica you have the dramatic flood at the end of the world, but then you also have the mundane idea of the future being 18 degrees all year round. It speaks to this slow-burning apocalypse. We’re expecting drama, but we’re probably not going to notice it’s happening.

MIC I made this project partly to make people pause when they think about seasonal change, because the variety is what makes life liveable. One day, the planet could be grey every day, no matter where you are in the world. I like the orderliness of hot summers, cool autumns, cold winters and rainy springs. One day, pre-flood, when we’re still here, we’ll look back and want to play in the snow. There are things in life which people take for granted. I love animals. My favourite family of animals are corvids. I think they’re amazing but people don’t like them. In Western culture people see them as bad luck, dangerous or deceitful, but I think they’re cute. I like to see the good in things.

EM You have such a wide range of influences, from the music in Pokémon to Lil B and Cocteau Twins. You don’t distinguish between popular and high culture; you just love music.

MIC I love music so much. Grime was my first musical love, and my second was video game music. I love snow levels in games; I love snow music in ice levels in any computer game. In Pokémon Diamond and Pearl, the music that plays when you go to Snowpoint City is the best music of any snow-level in a game. Shamtarctica isn’t a soundtrack for a video game, but it’s my contribution to the pantheon of environmentally centred music. Some music just sounds like a season, or like a kind of weather. There are certain cultural associations between sounds, instruments, weather and seasons. For example, if you think of a summer or beach level in a game you often hear Caribbean pans. Shamtarctica follows the tradition of making music for a certain kind of place. I feel like I’ve been able to combine all those influences: Pokémon, Cocteau Twins, Kate Bush, Lil B and Wiley in one falsity, in a way that’s really apparent to a listener. I feel proud that Nam and I have made it and I’ve been able to big up my heroes. .