World's End FM

Product Information

East End troubadour Hak Baker announces his highly-anticipated debut album, W orlds End FM, an extraordinary creative leap tailor-made for an era of social inequity, internet addiction and post-pandemic disillusionment, to be released on 9 June 2023 on Hak Attack Records, AWAL. It gives you a sense of ownership, because you’re segregated — this is where I’m from, so I must look after this place at all costs.

With his love of language stemming from a childhood of asking his mother what certain words meant, and being told to “go and look up in the dictionary”, Hak’s style and execution blends a combination of cockney dialect picked up from growing up in the Isle of Dogs, Jamaican Patois from his mother and grandmother and a flow developed from his younger years as a Grime MC. The slightly-too-earnest air surrounding ‘Bricks in the Wall’ and ‘Run’ exudes serious T4 on the Beach, trilby hat energy, doing nothing more than remind us that, despite how it might have seemed at the time, a lot of music back in the ’00s really wasn’t all that. Opening The Other Stage at Glastonbury last year, and performing at Boomtown, 6 Music Festival, Field Day, Live at Leeds and previously supporting the likes of Celeste, Slowthai, Chronixx, Pete Doherty, Wolf Alice and Plan B, Hak Baker also became the face of the Dr Martens mural in East London, playing a raucous show for the punk shoe brand, as well as being chosen as the face of Fender’s American II Collection, collaborating with British Jamaican designer Nicholas Daley. Windrush Baby”, released today and lifted from Worlds End FM, is an opportunity for this fiercely proud son of the Docklands to fully mark out his lineage and proclaim his Jamaican heritage. I’m an MC and poet all the same,” it is Hak’s rebel music and artistic integrity that sets him apart and puts him at the vanguard of British culture in 2023.The pointed, Mike Skinner-isms of opener ‘DOOLALLY (Unreleased)’ and the angular rock of ‘Telephones 4 Eyes’ offer a brief window to what he is capable of, but these darker moments are few and far between, for the most part Baker falls back on that signature indie pop sound that threatens to deceive.

Collateral Cause’ has a wistful, moving quality, something that in the wrong hands might become mawkish – not here, though, with Hak producing something with genuine empathy. With Vice stating “Baker subverts what a British folk singer can be”, culturally he sits as comfortably beside the likes of Madness, The Specials and Benjamin Zephaniah, as he does The Streets, Kano, Akala and Greentea Peng. It’s not afraid to get dark, but there’s humour too – on record, as on the stage, Hak Baker is irrepressible. God only knows where this could go,” Niall Horan wonders on “Heaven”, the lead single from his third and best album.Most poignantly, the crowd’s response to old-school anthem ‘Conundrum’ completely overwhelms him, sparking an infectious, beaming smile that stretches across his face. It’s a state of affairs that has encouraged Baker to continue deepening his ties to Jamaica and Grenada, with the ultimate goal being to give back to the island nations that helped forge him. Despite the apocalyptic gloom of ‘World’s End FM’, it’s an album overflowing with love, spirit and unity. DOOLALLY’ is an immediate highlight, followed by the bold statement of community that is ‘Windrush Baby’. As I get older, I know that that’s innately what I’m really trying to fall back on: alcoholism is something I’ve used to not go crazy.