How to make a MASTER PEACE: inside the bold evolution of a new indie-pop maverick, as he gears up to drop a debut album that isn't coming in quietly. Check out the latest cover story for our New Music Friday playlist edit, The Cut.

Words: Martyn Young.

"I genuinely believe this is probably going to be the best body of work to come out of 2024." Indie-pop dreamer turned incendiary rabble-rousing party starter Master Peace is bursting with confidence and energy as he prepares to release his whip-smart and cocksure debut album 'How To Make A Master Peace'. The album is the culmination of three years in which Peace has established himself as a genre-defying maverick capable of bouncing across different sounds, all tied together with his boundless enthusiasm and playful desire to shake things up and rattle a few cages. The album was the logical next step after years of building hype, yet, for Peace himself, things weren't always going so swimmingly.

"I put out three EPs, and in my head, I thought I couldn't put out another EP. You kind of get bored," he admits. "I was like, let's go for the big boys. We don't have all day in terms of being an artist. You just need to crack on with it and get it out right now. I want to crack on with it and get it out right now. You have artists that drop their debut album when they're 18/19, and I'm just like, alright, cool, I just want to get it out. Enough time has passed, and I hope people understand what Master Peace is by now."

That sense of fevered impatience and drive is what propels his work, and with this record, it seems that Master Peace himself has finally figured out what he is, or at least what he wants to be. "I understand music a bit more. I came into music a bit blindsided because I knew what I liked, but I didn't really understand why I liked it," he ponders. "There was that element of not really understanding why I was drawn to those songs when I was younger or why this or that person influenced me. As I grew into myself, I'd go back and find songs I used to like. Now that I'm older, I understand why I liked those songs. For me, as a person, I've seen a lot. More than I had three years ago. Three years ago, I only knew this one thing, and I was only writing about this one thing, and then Covid happened. I hadn't really experienced life as much. I'm not a baby anymore. I'm not shielded, and there's no guard. I've experienced what I need to experience to write an album."

In conversation with Peace, you can't help but be carried along with his infectious energy as he talks a mile a minute, eager to just put every last thought and idea out into the world, an impetus mirrored in the melting pot of influences that make up the sound of his debut album that contains more than enough retro nostalgia for the halcyon days of mid-noughties indie sleaze mixed with a fresh electro-pop sound for 2024, with all manner of detours in between. A true student of pop, Peace began looking a bit deeper into what made his favourite music so thrilling. "I feel like it was a lot of early stuff from artists that I'm into," he explains. "Artists like early Calvin Harris. LCD Soundsystem and a lot of Libertines and Bloc Party. Another part of it was MIA and Phil Collins. There were a lot of elements of different things. I spent the whole of 2022 listening to debut albums, and then, at the beginning of 2023, I wrote my debut. I would be going on the internet and looking for reviews as to why their album stood the test of time and why people liked it at the time. Even if they didn't like it at the time, like Calvin Harris' 'I Created Disco' at the beginning, people didn't get it, but as the years have gone on, people have realised it's actually a great album. I wanted to understand why nobody got it at the beginning."

The desire to confound and shake things up resulted in an album more diverse and dynamic than any work he has previously released. "My vision and goal was to make an album to stand the test of time rather than something a bit obvious and basic where people are like, 'Yeah, I knew that was going to come from Master Peace'," he proclaims confidently. "Nobody would have expected where I went with it."

The end result is a fearless turbo-charged step up and a genuine evolution of the Master Peace sound. "It's both fearlessness and honesty," he says. "With my album, I tried to make something that people who are teenagers could relate to and see and understand. This is how it feels to be a young person in London at this time and in this current moment. Like The Streets did with 'Original Pirate Material' about being on the dole and not having a lot of money."

The album is also powered by anger or at least a spirit of frustration as Peace channels his experiences with all the myriad roadblocks and setbacks of the modern-day music industry into invigorating and nihilistic Gen-Z anthems. In short, Peace feels success is a long time coming, and if people were going to continually try to put him in boxes, then the only way forward was to try to blast out of them. "I was on a major label and putting out EPs. I was selling tickets and selling out my shows, but I wasn't getting the same love that other artists were getting that had done less than me, not even in a stuck-up way but generally," he argues. "Another artist will come and be fast-tracked through the industry, whereas my biggest thing was I'd do my thing, and everybody would underplay it. It would be 'rapper Master Peace'. Yes, I've rapped in the past when I was in a crew, and yes, I do rap a bit on indie songs, but I do sing as well, and people would always underplay it. It used to really upset me. I was trying to aim for pop star and be the pop and indie guy for the alternative Black kids and people like me. I felt so frustrated."

For around a year, the frustration and anger swirling around Peace made him question his whole existence as an artist. "After my sold-out tour, I had got to that point where I didn't know if I wanted to make music anymore," he remembers. "In my head, I was like, 'Fuck this, I just can't be arsed. I'm done. I don't want to do it any more'. I got in a session with Matty Schwartz who produced my album and my last EP. He noticed that I wasn't myself. He said, what's going on? It feels like you don't even want to be here? I said If I'm totally honest, I don't. I'm a bit over this music thing. I think it's stupid, and it's a popularity contest. It's who you know, not actual talent. Matty told me, why don't you put it into your music and say how you really feel?

"That's how the 'Peace of Mind' EP came, and that gave me a new sense of life by not caring anymore whether I'd get that love and just doing it, fuck it, whether they like it or not, I'm going to do what I'm doing. When I released that EP, things began to actually work, and people were like, 'I see him a little bit and understand him a bit more'.

The partnership with Schwartz has certainly been a fruitful one. "Meeting Matty changed my whole mindset, and I'm so grateful now that I'm back to myself, loving making music, and feeling like I've got a purpose," says Peace. "Someone else can get a fast track, and that's sweet, but I'm still here getting the leftovers when I should be getting the main meal like everyone else."

Now, rather than letting it get him down, Peace uses the injustices he feels to drive him on, comfortable in his own force of personality and artistry. "It wasn't like fans weren't coming. It was working," he says. "The industry, in terms of the gatekeepers, were like, yeah, let's just keep this over there and push that person while I'm just on the sidelines waiting to get on."

In the face of all this industry turmoil, it might have been easy for Master Peace to make a sanitised and careful indie-pop album free from any risk-taking. Master Peace is never ever going to play it safe, though, and instead, his thrilling debut revels in ugliness and discordance. "I don't want it to sound too pretty. It's like medium ugly," he laughs. "You can hear me a bit off key or taking the mickey a little bit or laughing in the background. I like to keep that real element. I made this album in two weeks. I had no old songs and made them. Because I made the songs fresh, there was no emotional attachment to them; I kept that energy when I was recording them. I try never to make it too serious. It's never that deep. Art shouldn't be explained. If you hear me coughing or laughing in a song, then I left it in there for a reason. I make music for the kids who don't care. I want people to be like, 'He's having a bit of fun'.

Despite the in-your-face quality of the most hyper tracks on the record, there are still a few lovely moments that harken back to that wide-eyed romantic dreamer of a few years ago. "I needed those songs to cater for the old Master Peace," he laughs. "The old fans like the emotional side. The new Master Peace indie sleaze fans love the LCD gnarly electronic record of taking drugs and getting fucked. I've got to cater to both parties on the album but still do something that I would listen to."

Peace acknowledges that he's now firmly an indie artist working in a long lineage of acts, but he's still determined to do things a bit differently and rage against the establishment. "Yes, I'm an indie artist, but I don't want to make that obvious indie album," he says. "There are so many elements of indie music. You've got to be a bit spicy. I know the 6 Music Dads and the Rough Trade heads are going to be like, 'OMG, this isn't traditional indie', but I know that this record will stand the test of time in terms of being indie music that is a bit leftfield and more forward-thinking than traditionally getting a few guitars out and singing a couple of ballads. I didn't want to do that. There are elements, but then you've got songs like 'Los Narcos' that sounds like something out of a movie, hits you in the face, wake up LCD Soundsystem vibe. Then you've got 'I Might Be Fake' with Georgia, which is a very noughties Princess Superstar vibe. I'm just trying to keep it fresh and interesting."

He diplomatically doesn't name any names, but it's clear Peace is frustrated with some of the more, shall we say, beige side of the current indie scene and sees himself as a fiery interloper making the sort of statement he wants to hear. "There are a lot of bands in the current climate that play it safe," he says. "They get praised for doing something that isn't rocket science. When's someone going to do something where I'm like, 'Oh shit! That was insane; what the hell was that?' I want to go into an album and think, 'Fuck, I haven't ever heard anything like this'. The best place you want to be is you either hate it and think it's shit, or you LOVE IT. That's what I was going for."

'How To Make A Master Peace' is the sound of an artist cutting loose and revelling in freedom and a huge sense of confidence and ambition. It's an ambition that drives Master Peace to aim for a Mercury Prize this year. "I'm manifesting it," he laughs. He's also planning to do lots of festivals and bring his raucous live show to tear up as many venues as he can find. After three years of patiently waiting in the wings Master Peace is here to firmly make his presence felt. It's a mission statement encapsulated in the opening track 'Los Narcos'. "It's everything I wanted to say and more about this game that we play," he explains. "I've never really openly said anything. I've always been the guy that plays the game, keeps my mouth shut, and doesn't complain. 'Los Narcos' is like Queen's 'Another One Bites The Dust'. It's very 'wake the fuck up'. That's the vibe." Master Peace's debut album 'How To Make A Master Peace' is out now. ■