South London’s Jesse James Solomon and Mack Retreat From the Shadows
Jesse James Solomon & Mack’s Oil & Water artwork. Graphic by Chris Panicker.
Pitchfork writer Alphonse Pierre’s rap column covers songs, mixtapes, albums, Instagram freestyles, memes, weird tweets, fashion trends—and anything else that catches his attention.
Ten years ago, Jesse James Solomon and Mack (formerly credited as Black Mack) uploaded their first official collaboration, “Lionel Jesse,” to YouTube. On the cut, from Solomon’s debut EP, the south east London native lays his understated teenage bars over Mack’s slow-skittering hi-hats, assembling something that’s as hypnotic as it is precise. It’s also local to its core, with Solomon giving a stark glimpse of his Woolwich neighborhood in his opening line: “Spent some days in ’Dam, but I’m from Wooly where they spray a man.” Now, a decade later, Solomon and Mack have dropped their first joint project, Oil & Water, and they’re still sticking to what they do best. There are new stylistic experiments—pitch-shifting, psychedelic loops—but it’s still a collection of murky beats with bounce and lived-in south London memories.
Back in 2016, I’d watch the killer Boiler Room set that Solomon and Mack did as part of Sub Luna City—the group that also included 10k mainstay Jadasea, rapper-producer Rago Foot, and Edgar the Beatmaker, better known as King Krule—repeatedly. It felt like eavesdropping on a group of friends freestyling in the garage, capturing the true nature of the collective’s most memorable music. Since then, Solomon and Mack have been slightly less active publicly than their collaborators. Mack produced a little for New York underground luminary Wiki, and spent five years working as an A&R at XL Recordings. Solomon, meanwhile, put out inconsistent EPs and singles, sometimes rapping with UK rap royalty like Skepta and Giggs, as he drifted in and out of relationships with labels. He’s rounded back into form in the last few years, though, by doing group projects (like JJJ, with Jadasea and John Glacier, and Sunfall, also with Jada) that have had a little more meat on the bone.
For the most part, Solomon and Mack were at odds with the factory-like churn the music business wants artists, especially rappers, to engage with, but they’d rather let music collect dust in digital folders, waiting for the right time to let it go. Oil & Water seems like their way of meeting in the middle. It’s a substantial 14-track project—which, to them, might as well be 05 Fuck Em—that amplifies their style without losing the feel of boys messing around in the studio. They were in the Peckham studio where they made the album when I called the duo on Zoom, to chat about what they’ve been up to, how Oil & Water came about, and more.
Pitchfork: When I hit you up, Mack, about doing this interview, I brought up how I had been introduced to your music through this tape you did with Metro Zu’s Lofty305 a decade ago. It was such a throwback that it seemed like it blew your mind.
Mack: That killed me. When I put this tape [Oil & Water] on streaming, I didn’t even have a Spotify profile yet. So Jadasea went to check if they made a [Spotify] Radio for me, and, when he did, Lofty was in there along with, like, SpaceGhostPurrp, John Glacier, and all the weirdos of the internet. Those are all my people, but I was still like how are they going to do that? Funny, man.
Is it a strange feeling that streaming services use their algorithm to sort you however they feel fit?
Jesse James Solomon: Yeah, because it will go, If you like this, then you like this. And it’s some guy who you think is whack.
Mack: Or some guy who is rinsing your style. How do they even distinguish what’s good and what’s not?
Let’s take a step back. What bonded both of you as artists?
Mack: We were friends first, kicking it in studios for a year or two before we ever made “Lionel Jesse.”
Solomon: You know when you have a friend group, but within that friend group you have that person that you’re just locked in with? That’s me and him. And so we always made music together, but so much of it just sat on folders. We didn’t want this one to be like that.
Was it hard not to get trapped by the way the music industry wants you to release music constantly?
Mack: No, I found it easy to not get trapped. I find it easy to disassociate, but the music industry is like an economy that they try to force you to engage with. We have real life stuff going on, like traveling or dealing with health. I don’t want to go to Soho and meet with a playlister from Spotify; I’d rather be chilling in the neighborhood with my people, at the home studios. DIY.
What initially drew me to Sub Luna City is how organic it felt. Did you try to recapture that feeling on this album?
Solomon: Jada was the catalyst for all of this. Over the pandemic, he just started outpacing all of us and it was inspiring to see my brother making beats and how diligent he was about it all. I remember asking him how many songs he put out lately and he was like, “Hundreds,” while I probably had, like, 30-something on my entire Spotify page. It rubbed off on me. Now it feels like we’ve done a 360, like I have that same feeling making music that I did all those years ago again. Because, for a while through COVID, I didn’t see Mack for years. Not until the end of 2022 or 2023 did we link back up.
Mack: For years, all of our friends were scattered and then all of a sudden we were all back in London together. We was never in the same place, and now we’re always in the same place. Jesse is one of those friends from way back that you can go without seeing for months or years and ain’t a day passed.
Mack, how do you think that the time you spent working for a label changed your beats?
Mack: You’re trying to build artists and pitch them, but then they also have a criteria they want you to meet. They’re asking you about metrics while I just really believe in this person. It does change your ear a bit.
I guess in the last couple of years I’ve played with tempos more. I got really into some American beats, like shit EST Gee would rap over that’s, like, 150 BPM, but that’s not really for dancing. But that goes full circle because, as a kid, I was in love with the energy of jungle and drum’n’bass.
Solomon: Your beats haven’t changed for me. I remember the whole time I didn’t see you I was wondering if Mack is still cooking those crazy-ass beats, and when you showed me it was classic Mack.
What does the title of the project mean to you?
Solomon: I actually got the name of the project from a meeting I had with a label guy. He was telling me, “I know music and business are oil and water, but you still have to do TikTok and this and that if you want this,” and my takeaway from that conversation was: That’s a hard name.
Mack: It became like an everyday mantra for me, and I like how it can be interpreted in multiple ways. Like, it’s not about us in opposition, but it could be. This is my brother that I love to pieces, but we bump heads more than anyone and be making tunes off that. It’s funny. Out of all my friends, I argue with him the most, but that’s why we’re best friends.
What do you fight about?
Solomon: Dumb shit, man, we had an argument the other day about…
Mack: Terrence Howard, bro! He had this thing on Joe Rogan, and everyone in the studio thought we were going to fight, and then, five minutes later, we were outside smoking a cigarette. Remember Parklife Festival in Manchester? We had an argument and then we started wrestling around the hallways of the hotel. He’s always trying to sweep my legs out.
What song means the most to you on the project?
Solomon: “Have Faith,” because it’s the first one that we did and it felt like a turning point for me. But, today, my favorite song from it is “Give & Go.”
“Give & Go” has my favorite line on the project, the Bukayo Saka line. Who’s the best in the UK rap scene at name-dropping a soccer star?
Solomon: Everyone in London has a good football reference these days, but Headie One jumps out to me, because he has the big ones that everyone knows. He’s got that Mo Salah one [on “Know Better”]. Youngs Teflon is good at it, too.
What about Nines?
Mack: Yeah, Nines was always on his Arsenal shit. You know what’s funny is that when we first started you and Archy [Marshall] did an entire football- and Ronaldo-themed mixtape that never came out.
Solomon: Yeah, it was called Could Have Been a Baller. I was so young when I made that and I was still fresh off playing football, so when I started smoking weed that was all I would think about.
Why did you want to release a full-length project now?
Mack: The whole time making it we never even spoke about an EP or an album; we were just knocking out songs. And I wanted to have something that people could point to. I would always meet people and tell them I make music and they would say, “What’s your Spotify?” and I would have to say, “I don’t have one.”
Solomon: Mission accomplished. Now we just gotta keep the momentum up.
How does it make you feel that these checkmarks feel necessary for you to be deemed relevant as rappers and producers?
Mack: It just seems to be the name of the fucking game right now, man.
Solomon: But it can be good. When you take a long hiatus it makes it harder to drop again, because you just start to feel the pressure. Then when you get into a rhythm releasing becomes like breathing. For me, I got music I need to get off. I don’t have a desire to be prolific, but I might have to be.
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Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
