The Streets - None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive

The Guardian 80

(Island)
A lot has happened since Mike Skinner bowed out in 2011 – and this ‘album of rap duets’ is full of riches

For years, Mike Skinner has been living his best post-superstar life – DJ-ing regularly, raising small Streets. But nearly a decade on from his two 2011 albums, he returns with a banging outing he’s dryly downplayed as “an album of rap duets”.

Here are garage tunes freighted with everyman wisdom, drum’n’bass throwbacks where Skinner’s deadpan Barnet-via-Birmingham delivery meets a crush of on-point contributors, from Ms Banks to Idles. Exes and phone etiquette figure – by now, listeners will know how this wordsmith goes deepest when he seems most shallow. The titles alone are a marker of how well Skinner still dances on the philosopher-party animal cusp.

Pitchfork 55

On the Streets’ first album in nine years, the UK rapper returns to the simple snark of his early music, but his youthful misadventures have been replaced by the jaded pronouncements of middle age.