BRAND NEW: The making of Sam Akpro
One summer's afternoon in 2020 during the COVID-19 lockdown, South Londoner Sam Akpro glanced up from the microphone he was clutching to see a group of 20 police officers marching in his direction. He never expected his off-the-cuff performance on Peckham Rye to attract quite so much attention - both from the local community or the authorities - but the people of SE15 had long been craving the type of stunt pulled by the rising musician and his mates that day.
Hours earlier, with the help of his friend Louis Dobbs who runs local streetwear and media brand Observa, Akpro was plugging into a rented generator and preparing to sprinkle his post code with some much needed live music alongside fellow South Londoner Wu-Lu.
“It was vibes until the feds came,” chuckles Akpro as we settle at a table in the garden of The Gowlett Arms, a local pub preferred by the musician.
The DIY event was one of the first times Sam had been able to take the music he had spent the last year cooking in his bedroom out into the real world and the reception he received that day sparked everything that came next. Back then, the burgeoning musician was only just getting started and Sam had no idea where the growing buzz surrounding him would take him. Akpro’s pace-setting debut EP ‘Drift’ - which he had co-produced with Finn Billingham of Sunken - wouldn’t come out until the following year and the youngster was still fine tuning his guitar skills and honing his hallucinogenic, off-kilter fusions of jazz, funk and punk.
Fast forward to 2023 and everything is now falling into place for the Peckham-born artist. His upcoming headline show at Peckham Audio is set to go down as one of the biggest nights in his music career to date, taking to the stage alongside his band the City Scrapers to celebrate his journey so far while also laying down his intent for the future.
“You know when you have a goal that you want to happen but it happens in a way that's not what you thought it was going to be - I guess this is what this is now,” Sam says over a roll-up cigarette in the days leading up to releasing his sophomore EP ‘Arrival’. The new project, he explains, is “a bit more raw” and “more blunt” than its predecessor, swapping out the abstract introspectiveness found on his debut record for a more industrial view of his inner-city surroundings.
“[Drift] wasn't drawing from much outside influence in terms of the way I live,” he says, “it was quite otherworldly and speaking about being on coves and shorelines - I don't do that shit, it's more in my head. This project is more out there,” he gestures nonchalantly in the direction of the busy Peckham high street a few roads over. “Even just the sounds and production is more influenced by the city.”
Consisting of four tracks, ‘Arrival’ is certainly the musician’s most intense project to date. Written during the pandemic, it has an unavoidable sense of claustrophobia etched throughout the track list, diving down sampling rabbit holes and experimenting with drum breaks. The visual for lead track 'Trace’ sees Sam sleepwalking through Peckham after dark, backed by a dreamscape of dub reggae and funk-driven basslines, while songs like ‘New Blocks’ showcase the sheer power of his band.
It’s almost too safe to say that the EP reflects his surroundings growing up in Peckham, because Sam’s music is the product of an entire childhood of cultural wandering.
A self-proclaimed “nerdy person” during his younger years, Sam veered away from the sporty crowd at his school and ended up finding his herd at the local skatepark. Here, he rubbed shoulders with kids from all around the city - including fellow Peckham creatives Jadasea and Pinty - and got in with a group of skaters based in East London. Bouncing between his friends in Brockley and different parts of East, most of Akpro’s early to mid-teens were spent outside his place of birth. “I grew up in Peckham but everywhere else as well, which I think is good because you get to see other shit and meet other people,” he says.
It wasn’t until Sam turned 18 and began partying more that he began to spend the majority of his time in Peckham again. Like many people his age, Akpro was busy trying to find his place in the world and was discovering different hobbies and scenes where he belonged. It was around this time when Sam’s trusty skateboard began to collect more dust than it was used to. He had found a new passion in graffiti. “I had never really seen anything like that, I was never really aware of what graffiti was until that age…the way I used to look up to a lot of musicians I was looking up to a lot of writers as well."
It's clear to see the influence street art has in the local area - one walk down Rye Lane is all it takes to notice just how big of a deal the graffiti scene is to a lot of people. Akpro worked his way through countless spray paint cans over the next few years, he tells me, revealing one anecdote about how he bumped into prolific London graffiti artist 10 Foot - who currently has a wall dedicated to him in the Saatchi Gallery - at a Black Lives Matter rally in 2020.
Only when Sam started to take music more seriously did his painting streak begin to dry up. The 24-year-old originally started down the path of producing and imagined himself making beats for artists all around the world. Sam describes the moment he was locked away in his room trying to make beats when he heard Travis Scott's 'Astroworld' for the first time: "[It] merged guitar stuff with trap 808s - I was like this is hard I want to do that."
But it was the budding-producer's love for guitars which made him decide to learn the instrument himself and the lyrics naturally followed. He now had the blue print but it was missing the final piece - his band. Fortunately, his nightlife networking around Peckham proved beneficial and he soon managed to draft together a group and began rehearsals for Sam Akpro and the City Scrapers immediately.
The confidence in Sam's new EP 'Arrival' sounds effortless but the musician explains how he doubts his new ideas more now than he ever used to. "I was more naive before and was going with whatever, like 'ah this sounds cool lets do it' but as you get a bit better at what you're doing you start to second guess yourself and start to think is this going to be as good as the last thing I done," he says.
Treading the double edged sword of popularity and not wanting to slip up, Sam Akpro is steadily manoeuvring himself to the forefront of London's thriving music scene. Sam wraps up the interview by telling me: "every time I make something I'm trying to do it in a different way or make it sound different." And as it stands, he's succeeding.
Stream the 'Arrival' EP below:
- Words: Billy Ward
- Photography: Sam Willicome
- Styling/Creative Direction: ForOnce!
