SL shares new single ‘Block Tales’ ft. Catch & Giggs + announces short film dropping soon.

The first sound on “Block Tales” is low-end pressing against your chest. The bass doesn’t bloom it thuds, short and heavy, cutting space out of the mix. The drums hit like they’ve been boxed into a small room, close-mic’d, no extra reverb to soften the edges. The beat is stripped back to essentials, which means the voices have nowhere to hide.

SL comes in first. His delivery is steady, almost detached, but that’s what makes it sharp. He doesn’t shift pitch or stretch words for emphasis. Every line lands with the same weight, and the pauses between them are just as important as the words. He uses silence as punctuation, letting the track breathe before dropping the next bar. It’s the same quality that made “Gentleman” so unsettling when it first arrived calm on the surface, but tense underneath.

Catch changes the pace immediately. His verse comes fast, words tumbling over each other, as if he’s racing the beat instead of sitting inside it. He doesn’t smooth the delivery; he pushes it forward in quick bursts. The effect is sharp, unpredictable. Where SL’s voice makes the track feel controlled, Catch’s energy makes it feel unstable, like anything could happen in the next bar.

Then Giggs. His entrance alters the track without the instrumental shifting an inch. His tone is low, unhurried, and deliberate. The drums don’t slow down, but they feel like they do because of how he delivers his verse. He doesn’t fight for attention he makes the track move at his speed. Three verses, three different approaches, each pulling the beat in a different direction without breaking it. That contrast is the track’s core strength.

The video avoids spectacle. No drone shots, no stylised filters, no attempts to make the block look cinematic. It stays close: stairwells, walkways, corners. Faces half-lit, movements caught in tight frames. The camera work mirrors the song direct, with no effort to polish or universalise. What you see are the details of everyday South London, presented as they are, not dressed up for outside eyes.

“Block Tales” isn’t just another single; it’s the point where the project snaps into focus. The earlier tracks each carried part of the story: “Robbery” with its stick-up detail, “Paranoia” with its tight internal monologue, “Shooter” with the weight of outside threats, “Summertime” showing brief flashes of relief with Sainté and Knucks. Together they hinted at the scope of the tape. The title track brings them under one roof.

SL has always worked differently from his peers. Since “Tropical” and “Gentleman,” he’s refused to play into the cycle of overexposure. He keeps the mask on, limits interviews, and lets the tracks define him. That discipline has given him something rare in UK rap: control over how much the world sees. The streams are huge, the co-signs international, but the focus has never shifted away from the music itself.

The short film is the next step. Screening on September 11 and 12, it follows Trey, a fictional figure in a very real environment. It isn’t biography, but it doesn’t feel invented either. The references are obvious La Haine, Athena, Top Boy but the texture is SL’s. Handheld camerawork, damp estates, air that feels heavy even on screen. The film doesn’t expand the world so much as lock it in, showing that the themes in the music aren’t metaphors they’re settings.

The mixtape drops September 5, followed by a run of headline shows across Europe and the UK. The rollout hasn’t felt like promotion so much as a series of deliberate steps. Each single was a piece of the story, each visual matched the music instead of competing with it, and now the short film ties everything together. Nothing scattered, nothing throwaway.

What makes “Block Tales” effective is the refusal to compromise its focus. It isn’t arranged to chase playlist slots or engineer viral clips. It doesn’t sweeten its edges. The track ends the way it starts: sudden, unfinished, giving nothing away. That decision is telling. It leaves you with pressure still hanging in the air, refusing to resolve into something neat.

That’s how SL has built his position by doing less, but making sure what’s there holds. He doesn’t flood the market, doesn’t explain his moves, doesn’t open his world beyond what the music demands. That silence, paired with cuts like this, has kept him sharper than most.

“Block Tales” doesn’t make a claim about what UK rap is or where it’s going. It doesn’t have to. What it does is show three voices one calm, one urgent, one immovable sharing the same beat without diluting themselves. The strength is in the difference, not the sameness. The beat cuts out, the track stops, and you’re left with no conclusion. Just the echo of three verses still pulling in different directions.