Scroobius Pip: Let Them Come

Let ’Em Come had been around a few years by December 2011 and hadn’t lost anything. Scroobius Pip’s whole position—the long beard, the tattooed hands, the spoken word delivered with a kind of patient fury—was the anti-hype argument taken to its logical conclusion: enumerate every trend, every scene, everything people were losing their minds over, and say none of it matters, I’ll still be here when it’s gone. Dan le Sac’s production underneath him is mechanical and blunt in exactly the right way. What made the track stick wasn’t the argument itself—every serious artist makes some version of it, I’m the real thing and the rest is noise—but the specificity of how Pip made it. No vagueness. He named things and meant it. That kind of directness is rare enough that it carries across years.