Rise Above Hate

“Everything was stripped away from me,” Unknown T tells Apple Music. “I’ve been waiting to set the record straight for a while now about everything and I’ve had to wait. I’ve had to hear slander and lies on my name and my character.” To accurately measure the loss described by the London MC (real name Daniel Lena), you’d have to first trip back to 2018, where he landed one of the surprise hits of the year with ‘Homerton B’ and helped usher in drill’s status as the sound of the UK streets. Pairing wildly imaginative bars with a gruff, deep-voiced delivery, the east Londoner unearthed a style that suggested he held all the keys to a glittering future. However, eight months after his arrival, he was arrested and charged with murder and violent disorder. Consistently maintaining his innocence while remanded in custody, Lena was cleared of all charges in February 2020. Rise Above Hate is a deep-coloured and courageous exploration of his journey piecing together the threads of what happened to him. “The music is the best way I know how to get things off my chest whenever I’m going through it,” he says. “If it wasn’t for that I’m not sure where I’d be or how I would have coped. I know who I am so that was the message to myself the whole time. To just keep my head above all the bullshit and eventually rise above and beyond it all.” Here, Unknown T guides you through his debut release, track by track. Steppy
“I wanted to start the tape off with ‘Steppy’ because it takes me right back to the start of this. I didn’t know for sure it would be used as the intro but I see it as the start of me dealing with this situation through music, so it made sense. It was in the cell on the night I was arrested. That night, no lie, that’s when I started writing ‘Steppy’. All of the anger, the hurt and the confusion that was inside of me at the time, I was putting it all into the bars. When I was released on bail conditions, I called my manager and said, ‘Yo, I need to get all of this energy