Issue 113 / April-May 2021

AYS TA R
Returning with the third instalment of his mixtape series, the rapper
talks musical growth, finding his flow and staying true to the city.
When AYSTAR used to hear a smart rap, it
left a bittersweet taste. “[I’d be] like, ‘That
was sick, why didn’t I think of that?’” he
says, thinking back to his initial inspiration
to take up the mic over 10 years ago.
Fast-forward to now and it is others within the grime
food chain who’re now looking up at Aystar with a similar
level of inspiration and envy. After the self-scrutinous
start, he’s formed a career that’s seen him go from viral
YouTube star to speaking today as an authority at the
apex of the scene.
Alongside Manchester’s Bugzy Malone, the Toxtethborn
rapper has stood as a provincial outlier since 2015
and helped shift the groundswell away from London to
rightly put eyes on the north. But rather than a quest to
gain recognition in the south, the journey has stemmed
from the innate belief he could match and better what he
was hearing in his youth. “I just fell in love with being able
to just fuck around with words and get your points across
while rhyming,” he says of the moment ambition and
ability started to crystallise. “And I realised, I’m just better
at that than a lot of other people.”
Ten years on, this sure sense of self hasn’t plateaued.
On his latest mixtape, Scousematic 3, he retains a
swaggering bravado that’s as unflinching as his equable
flow. “Look bro, I’ve gotta be top three in England when
it comes to just slappin’ on a rap beat,” he proclaims on
Straight In, with the added boast: “I made so
much dough last year I forgot to rap.”
The mixtape is a confident reassertion of
stature after a short while out of the spotlight,
but it isn’t all self-aggrandising. Aystar’s
unwavering flow and daring architectural
wordplay are baked into the heart of the
record. “She sees me fly past on crosses, now
she thinks I’m a Catholic,” he quips on In And
Out, just one of many razor-sharp lines that
carry the signature wit and self-awareness that
put the rapper on the pedestal he now enjoys.
Starting off as a freestyler operating in
hip-hop territory, his more recent mixtapes
have carried greater drill and grime sensibilities with
their bouncy production and staccato rhyme schemes.
Scousematic 3 follows suit for the most part, but there
are more expansive flourishes that lean into RnB on In
And Out, with weighty features across the record from
Giggs and Digga D marking his ascent to the top. Aystar
puts this down to natural progression. “I’m growing as
an artist,” he says, “so my music is going to reflect that
as well.”
Aystar caught his first break with his Bar Session
back in 2012. The video sees a fresh faced Aystar
freestyling down the back entry of a terraced street. With
bars laced with stories of drugs and violence, it’s his
straight-faced humour and gritty portrait of life coming
up in L8 and L15 that marked him out as a talent in the
making. “Guy got left with a popped eye, no spinach,
that’s what you’ll be getting if you think you’re the illest,”
he delivers, hood up and eyes fixed on the camera – no
hint of irony.
“I started putting freestyles out on MySpace and
they used to get crazy thousands of listens,” he says of
the formative years before the Bar Session. “I thought to
myself, ‘If I’m getting that on MySpace, if I do videos on
YouTube it’s got to get views’.” His instincts were right, with
the Bar Session now well on its way to two million views.
He credits his early inspiration to local collective
YOC for putting a Scouse stamp on a genre that wasn’t
yet known for a vernacular at home in the North West.
But where YOC’s lyrical flow matches that of mid-
2000s grime in its speed, with interspersed Scouse
inflections, Aystar’s own style would eventually bypass
any established norms and fall into the slowed down,
distinctive mould of his own voice.
“How can this Aystar yute have a lazier flow than
mine. This yute’s coooold,” announced Giggs back in
2016. The similarities in style would soon be heard
side by side on The Best taken from Giggs’ 2016 album
Landlord, but it was a deeper retreat into his own
personality that garnered Aystar national attention a few
years earlier.
“I remember years ago I was a bit more energetic,”
he says of his early style, before it switched to something
much slower and akin to a death stare marked by flashes
of unhinged twitchiness. It’s perhaps Scouse Matic
Freestyle, released in 2015, which signals the fullyfledged
arrival of its new form.
With its tantalising Mobb Deep-style beat, the track
becomes more flash fiction than song as Aystar stitches
together scenes lit by street lamps, gunfire and flashing
blue lights coming
into sight. With every
R elongated and C
“I want everyone
to know that
it’s straight
from our city”
crunching down harshly,
Aystar was producing
some of the Scousest
music ever made. The
accent becoming its own
instrument in the mix,
the local vernacular the
grounding flourishes and
authenticity that can’t be
plucked out of thin air by
producers. And with all
this, Aystar’s delivery keeps a straight face, barely moves,
or worries about simple rhyme schemes with words pingponging
between 16 bar arrangements. Nonchalant, lazy,
unfazed, unarsed, call it whatever – it’s a style that faces
its surroundings head on and doesn’t blink.
“I think that’s just a personality trait. Just the way that
I am, you know what I mean?” he says, when asked how
he arrived at the unflinching, slowed down flow he’s now
synonymous with. “I’m kinda’ like that anyway. So that’s
just how it comes out in my music. I never ever thought,
‘I’m gonna’ try and be like this, or like that’. When I rap,
it’s like me speaking to you,” he says, the tone in his voice
beginning to rhythmically shuffle forward like one of his
own bars. “I don’t change my voice. I don’t add a certain
energy. I just give you it the way I am.”
While Aystar now garners attention on a national
level, the lyrical content of his music hasn’t shifted far
from his life growing up around Toxteth and Wavertree.
He says the stories he tells on record aren’t necessarily
autobiographical, some stemming from real life events,
yet they still carry an air of first-person documentation
by way of geographical osmosis through remaining parts
of the areas he raps about. “I feel like you’ve got to live,
you’ve got to live and go through these experiences to
even be able to come up with the music,” he says. “If
I hadn’t experienced [certain things], I wouldn’t have
been able to come with that specific tune. It’s definitely
a mixture of what’s happening in life now. And what’s
happened previously.”
He outlines how Liverpool and his life here will
remain a core part of his music, irrespective of growing
national radio plays and attention from heavyweight stars
in the south. “That’s what brought me in the game. So, for
me to change the recipe now, I wouldn’t really be the guy
that I am.”
With London still an industry base for drill and grime,
the temptation to follow its lead is difficult to resist for
artists coming through. But for Aystar, the parallel reality
for rap artists up north offered its own chance to stand
out. “I’m trying to stay original. For a lot of people, when
they try and tap into the London scene, they forget who
they are,” he says. “I’ve been doing this from Liverpool for
so long that when people do take notice, I want everyone
to know that it’s straight from our city. You’re not mixing
me up with these London cats.”
Wearing the city’s colours so vividly in his music
comes with an apparent sense of pride. In many ways, it
comes across as a duty, an obligation to put his powers to
good use. “Being in the car and listening to the radio and
then hearing someone who’s representing your city, but
is actually good – it’s a good feeling,” he says. “Like, I’m
doing Liverpool justice, if anything,” he laughs. “If I was
making a show, I probably would have stopped a long
time ago.”
The notions of home are strewn across the cover
of Scousematic 3. With a Toxteth street sign partially
in view, a shot-up phone box and Aystar pensively
looking on, it seems to suggest a return to a scene of
social violence as an observer, rather than instigator.
Either way, it projects an image of authority, as if a
figure seeing the scenes shift around them while they
hold their ground. Perhaps a sense of contemplation in
the figure looking in the opposite direction within the
reflection of the broken glass.
It’s this sense of contemplation that marks this
current phase in Aystar’s career; no longer the hot new
talent, but something of a stalwart having made it 10
years in the game. While perspectives change, and the
palette of producers he’s working with, he doesn’t see
much else differently to the teenager who once felt slight
frustration that a clever rhyme wasn’t his own. “I know
who I am. You know what I mean? I know that I am
looked at as that person in Liverpool and in the north,” he
says, with air of consideration. “But at the same time, I
still just try and keep how I’ve been for the past 10 years.
I don’t let that change.” !
Words: Elliot Ryder / @elliot_ryder
Photography: Joe Harper
Scousematic 3 is available now.
@aystar__
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