When Selló, a young rapper from Clondalkin in Dublin, started listening to drill, he found it hard to connect to it. Drill, a minimalist rap subgenre that emerged from Chicago over a decade ago – hard-core lyrically, sparse sonically – spread most successfully to the UK, where its London-flavoured incarnation has gone on to influence rap globally.
For Selló, whose eclectic brand of rap he labels Gaelic Drill, but which expands well beyond that subgenre, those early encounters with the genre he has adopted, adapted, and morphed, were alienating. “It wasn’t really indigenous to me,” he told the journalist Andrea Cleary at a public interview in Hen’s Teeth in Dublin 8 last year, “Most of the stuff I listened to was in the UK, America, it wasn’t anywhere near my estate and my home.”
Cut to Selló's breakout underground hit, Dublin, a song that has become a sort of contemporary anthem for the Irish capital, alongside Mango x Mathman’s Deep Blue, and Lankum’s Cold Old Fire. It’s a song packed with lyrics about Clondalkin, the number 13 bus, Irish footballers, the tension and intimacy of estates (“You’ll get robbed by your next door neighbour, and the next day they ask for a favour”), and the rallying dual-language cry of “Seasaigí, that’s my clann, my family”, all fuelled by a sample of The Foggy Dew.
While his debut 2022 part-album-part-mixtape, Sellotape, was rather unfairly overlooked for the most recent Choice Music Prize shortlist, he still found himself at the award ceremony earlier this year, nominated for Breakthrough Artist and for the song, No Love.
Sello’s trajectory is in flux, both underground and overground. Award nominations, check. An appearance on the Late Late Show, check. Record deals in Ireland and the UK, check. And this is still a career very much in progress. This is an artist who is constantly announcing he’s here, while also finding his feet. His self-created sound and genre may have its own name, yet the sounds and rhythms can change direction from track to track.
With major labels underpinning his career, he’s still working pretty much full-time in social care. He talks about his desire to make money in a genre with a disjointed industry framework. And his thoughts are nearly always running.
At Warner Music Ireland’s new office on George’s Street in Dublin 2, Selló is a little late and very apologetic about it. He’s somewhat guarded, maybe even slightly jaded, revealing that he has, in the past, been unimpressed by some interviews that often read like a Wikipedia entry as opposed to a creative interrogation of his work.
As I begin to discuss various tracks, and concur with his assessment of a fragmented industry infrastructure that often denies young rap artists a blueprint of success, he warms up. There’s a sense that he feels conflicted about the attention he gets, but knows he needs it to drive his profile.
“See rap music here, yeah? It’s a thing where it seems like there’s pressure, but nobody really cares, except for the fans. See things like mainstream media, getting in good festivals? I feel like the love us Irish rappers get is conditional love. It’s like when it’s suitable for people to love us, they love us.” It appears what Selló is trying to do is both represent a scene, and transcend it, one foot in the underground, another on the spotlit stage.
Selló speaks in almost a staccato fashion. At times it’s as though his selection of words is an internal debate in their composition, between the things he wants to say right now, and the next idea already brewing, mid-sentence. When he raps though, something is liberated. The air that exists when he catches himself between words when he talks evaporates, and the flow takes shape. He has a remarkable talent for an efficient, instantly repeatable line, designed to be roared.
“That’s my buachaill that’s my bro,” he announces in As Gaeilge. On Oggy feat. Offica from Drogheda’s A92 collective, he announces ‘Here, you man are only Irish on Paddy’s Day. An bhfuil tú réigh? Rugadh mé réigh,’ (are you ready? I was born ready).
He began rapping in secondary school, “I had two verses. When I used to freestyle, I used to freestyle the same thing. Writing music for me was always hard. I put so much into every line at the time. I didn’t know how to write music like I do now.” As he progressed, he began writing a track a month. “It was never a track a week, until I started making my first album. That’s when I was in the zone. When I first started off, I took a two-year break to make music at my own pace. I wasn’t rushed. Sometimes something would come in a day, sometimes in a month. I wasn’t under pressure.”
Early on, he encountered AyoMax, a young producer and traditional musician who was studying for his Leaving Certificate when Selló began catching on to the beats he was producing. As a boy, AyoMax was taught tin whistle by the folk musician John Francis Flynn, and then given lessons by Radie Peat from Lankum. Eventually, his love of rap blended with trad, and when Selló dropped in, the flavour of what became Gaelic Drill began to emerge. In that conversation with Cleary at Hen’s Teeth, Selló revealed he initially wanted to call this genre-in-the-making, simply, “Ceol”, as in music.
“I felt that I wouldn’t be able to sell it to people who don’t understand what ceol means,” Selló told Cleary. He felt the marketability to non-Irish speakers (unlike himself), wouldn’t click instantly, and he moved on to another idea: Gaelic Drill, catchy, intriguing. A few sentences later, Selló articulated the feeling that’s permeating so much cultural activity in Ireland right now, and what his musical core was grounded in, both the sounds and the lyrics. Irishness, he said, “is the thing”.
While everyone who is tracking an tonn nua – or New Éire, or Celtic revival, or whatever you want to call it – has been busy getting excited about this cultural boom in Ireland rooted in identity and remixing traditional aesthetics and sounds, many probably didn’t think to cop on to what happens next: that everyone else starts looking at Ireland too. A scene is a scene, a movement is a movement, and the specificity and energy of such things are exciting.
Whether it’s French Touch, Chicago drill, Brooklyn indie or UK garage, when something is hot, it’s hard to contain within the borders of place. People will begin to migrate towards it with intrigue, and it will also be exported. Right now, what is that? Selló said it: Irishness is the thing. In the UK, the US, and across Europe, Irish music, film, television, and other articulations of Irish culture that perhaps previously would have been seen as hyper-specific, local, idiosyncratic, are connecting. Could Selló be next?
If it’s classical music, if it’s rap, if it’s pop, RnB, whatever it is, make sure your identity is seen in it. Make sure people know that whatever you do, make sure that it’s you
Last year, Selló travelled to Dingle to perform as an IMRO Other Room act, a strand of Other Voices seen as a sort of broadcasting incubator for emerging acts, or even a rung on the ladder towards the St James’ Church stage. “What got my attention was Oggy,” says Molly King, Head of Development, Other Voices, referencing one of Selló's tracks. That song contains “a sample of a famous Traveller song, The Tri-Coloured House, I think it came from a collection put out in the 1980s, and Lankum had recorded that song on [the album] Cold Old Fire. I was like, who is this guy making this contemporary drill sound coming out of Ireland that’s colliding with Ireland’s songbook?”
King assesses Selló as “someone looking back to look forward, an Irish person who is interested in the tradition of music, and cross-pollinating that with a very contemporary rap sound. He was creating a home-grown sound that, to me, sounded like a redefining of what we may assume our contemporary culture is. And I think he does this with huge positivity.”
On a recent episode of RTÉ 2FM’s Behind The Track, an excellent Song Exploder-style series by Tin Pot Productions that pulls back the curtain of the genesis of songs, their inspiration, composition, and production, Selló spoke about the song Dublin, characterising his collaboration with AyoMax as, “Two fellas meeting off Instagram, went to the studio, made a track about the area, bang. Full stop. The track started to do its thing. We didn’t put one cent of marketing in, no ads, just literally word of mouth, organic.”
He went on, “That’s what Dublin [the track] was to me: it’s a statement that, yo, this is the Irish culture. We have people coming from all over the globe picking up the Irish samples, picking up the Irish language, and pushing it. Even if it’s classical music, if it’s rap, if it’s pop, RnB, whatever it is, make sure your identity is seen in it. Make sure people know that whatever you do, make sure that it’s you. Unapologetically.”
Back in the Warner office, Selló discusses his upcoming appearance at Electric Picnic, something he feels is “a very big statement for Irish rap. People don’t understand, but it’s very big, especially for the kind of music I make. People look at it like ‘oh he’s doing festivals because he’s a mainstream artist.’ They don’t look at me like a street artist any more because I dress nice, I can talk properly – I think anyway – and I do media, so they think I’m not a street guy.”
These efforts he’s making are a statement of intent, something that declares that, as he puts it, “this guy shows up, he won’t come looking like he’s going to rob the place, something like that.” The latter part of this statement, the judgmental attitude he experiences, is jarring. He is honest about the weird discomfort that can often accompany his mere presence at different versions of the top table.
“I feel that everywhere ... I feel that people feel some kind of intimidation. I always feel that way. When you see a group of lads that sound like they’re off the street, it’s like ‘are these lads meant to be here?’ ”
He singles out a moment when he went to the UK to sign a deal as an experience that altered the feeling, “You see rappers you listen to just walk by. You automatically feel like ‘oh my god, this is crazy’. You feel like you’re not meant to be there, but in a good way.”
The coining of Gaelic Drill was a smart marketing move, but it also collapses the tiers of Selló's eclecticism. There is a difference between the beat and the vibe. The contradiction of the genre title is that it’s also about expanding what drill can be, that, weirdly, Gaelic Drill is not drill, but something more expansive. “I’ve noticed recently people are calling me a drill artist. But they haven’t been listening to my album. I have hip hop songs, I have storytelling songs, I have afrobeat songs ... They’re all Gaelic-fused, but it’s different styles of music.” It’s the variation of styles that’s his genre, he says, “I think there are layers to what I’m trying to do.”
There’s a sense that his impatience for creative growth is tempered by an understanding that two years into music, things will align as he progresses. An artist he looks to right now, and someone he has huge respect for, is the young Crumlin woman, Yasmine Byrne, aka Jazzy, who earlier this year hit number one in Ireland and number three in the UK with the infectious Giving Me. “My team, we can match up with anybody. If we had the same experience as bigger artists in Ireland, we would be on the same wavelength,” he says, assessing how talent and innovation, matched with repetition, yields results.
“Keep in mind,” he says, “the biggest artist in Ireland in my eyes is Jazzy. She’s very good people as well, we’ve met. But the difference is, her team has experience. They know what gets the people going. We’re on the path of discovering that. And once we do, we won’t miss. Jazzy is not missing. She’s dropping hit after hit. Even if she’s not the main [artist], and she’s on the vocal, it’s still a hit ... Once we get that experience, we’re unstoppable.”
I don’t want to be narrowed too early. I’m not like a lot of rappers. I haven’t been here for 10 years. I haven’t established a sound
The drive for experience is also birthing experimentation. “Right now, me and the boys are making a new sound,” he says, casually, “Gaelic Drill came into play because of experimenting. So I’m experimenting again. I’m trying to find a new dimension. I’m trying to fuse genres. I’m always trying to mix something with something [else] and give people a new thing that wasn’t there before.”
He digs into the creation of one of his tracks, Come Ouu, a door-busting tune that both used and subverted Come Out Ye Black and Tans. “In the second verse, I put a reggae bassline under the sample. It fit like it was meant to be there ... I’m always trying to do little stuff like that.” He says if anyone was to film him while composing in the studio, “people would think I’m crazy or some type of shit. Me making music is the funniest thing you’ve ever seen. I’m doing push-ups, telling everyone to come in, leave, stand up, it’s too funny.”
This giddy approach to creativity, however, tends to become internalised. He struggles with not thinking about music, “I have thoughts running all the time. Even coming up here, my head was racing.” The one thing that stops that is football. Playing as a striker (he prefers to be in midfield) for Peamount United, everything else would disappear. “On the pitch is the only time I feel when nothing else matters. It’s the only time in my life when I feel like that. I need to go back to it, because it’s the only time I don’t think about anything.” Off the pitch, his mind starts going again, the next booking, the next track, the next idea.
Selló's forward-facing outlook has a dose of realism, but he also knows, quite rightly, that if things align, he could well achieve mainstream success. Right now, it’s arguable that the number of Irish rappers who have really ascended Ireland’s micro-industry is rather limited, but certainly diverse in voice and centre; Rejjie Snow, Kojaque, A92, for example. “I’m only in the door ... there’s so much to come,” he says, “I don’t want to be narrowed too early. I’m not like a lot of rappers. I haven’t been here for 10 years. I haven’t established a sound. Even the Gaelic Drill sound, that in and of itself hasn’t touched all of Ireland yet.”
He continues, “Bear in mind, Irish rap is not at the forefront of music in Ireland yet. Once it is, everyone is going to know about every release from every rapper, every artist.” He projects into future, wondering what the markers of mainstream success could be, how they will take form in Irish society, “When rappers start paying tax,” he suggests, then, laughing, “when they start blaming crime on rap music, I’ll be like, yeah, we’re here! We finally made it!”
He adjusts his thoughts. Crime and rap is an international cliche, and he searches for a home-grown issue. When people start blaming the housing crisis on rap, he says, “that’s when we’ll be like, ‘yo guys, rap music’s on top!’ ”
Electric Picnic runs from Friday, September 1st to Sunday, September 3rd in Stradbally, Co Laois
