Danny Brown, The Ritz, Manchester: an absurd and capitvating rollercoaster

With its sprung floors and dramatic backdrop, tonight’s former ballroom in Manchester makes for the perfect environment for Danny Brown’s fans to find their own relationship with his characteristic frenzy.

With 2023 boasting not one but two headline albums, solo effort ‘Quaranta’, and in rap’s newest super-duo ‘Scaring the Hoes’ with JPEGMAFIA, Danny is almost overloaded with new songs an expectant audience is excited to hear. After introducing himself with a trademark giggly “Hi I’m Daniel!” he rips through a four track run, all picked from ‘Quaranta’. The set, it emerges, has been neatly portioned into distinct eras, allowing the nuance and dexterity of his later albums to sit comfortably alongside the excess and intensity of the good old days. Dipping into the iconic and skittering ‘Lie 4’ and ‘Monopoly’, it’s obvious that between the shoutout lines “Nah, literally, shit on your mixtape!”, the furious bouncing and the pulsing strobe no one is going home with anything left in their fuel tank.

From the first bars of ‘Steppa Pig’ there’s an electricity in the room that’s unmatched, as everyone is given their first live taste of ‘Scaring the Hoes’. Clearly, if the pair could find the time in their diaries that’s a joint tour that would be shaking the doors off their hinges. Spat out at a breathless intensity the songs are made even briefer and knife-sharp with JPEGMAFIA’s verses left out, somewhere between a medley and blazing inferno of off-kilter party-starting rap at its finest. The group’s anthem, ‘SCARING THE HOES’ manages to receive one of the most wrist-breakingly fast handclaps to offer up one’s arms to.