Highly Flammable

Highly Flammable is the debut EP from BBC Sound of 2017 nominee, MOBO award-winner, and Croydon’s favourite daughter, Nadia Rose.

Since coming to widespread attention in 2015 with her track ‘Station’, Rose has gone from strength to strength, including winning best video at the 2015 MOBO Awards for her single-shot, girl-powered clip ‘Skwod’.

Highly Flammable has been in the works for many months, with Miloco joining the fray from April 2015. We were lucky enough to have Nadia come and record in our rooms consistently from April to December 2015, working with a number of our talented producers, engineers and assistants.

Frequenting the studios at Westpoint, The Red Room London, The Bunker and The Bridge, Rose and her team worked with Matt Foster, Sam Harper, Eddie Serafica, Will Purton, Darren Jones and Jake Gordon. The latter two who both worked on fellow London emcee Skepta‘s Mercury Prize wining Konnichiwa.

Engineer Matt Foster was drafted by his friend, and Nadia’s manager, to mix the hit single ‘Skwod’, in addition to the mixing Matt undertook a fair bit of vocal editing and chopping up on the track with Nadia attending the session to get the flow and energy on point. All other tracks on the EP were mixed by Pieces of 8 engineer Jake Gordon (with the exception of the final track by Kideko, which Nadia features on) at Westpoint and The Red Room London.

Eddie Serafica took the helm of production duties on the opening track ‘Intro’, a dark and moody track with accompanying video which was shot in The Bridge, and released on Rose’s social media just days before the project’s release.

When telling us about the recording, Eddie confessed this partnership came about quite by accident!

“Nadia had gone out of the studio for a bit and I just wanted to listen to this beat I made a few days before, on the big Augspurger monitors in The Red Room. She happened to come back in whilst I was listening and really loved it and said that’s what she was looking for for the intro of her EP. So she immediately started writing to it, and I also made a couple of arrangement tweaks based on what she wrote and a few days later we recorded all the vocals and and we decided to chop in various voicemails she had received from friends and family to put at the beginning of the track.”

Eddie also engineered ‘Skwod’, ‘Tight Up’, ‘2H2H’ and ‘U Know What’, with all sessions spread between The Bridge and The Red Room London.

“For most of the tracks Nadia wrote her verses and recorded everything straight after it was written, and we would maybe go back and refine things, and/or maybe re-writing some lyrics and re-recording some parts afterwards,” says Eddie.

Two weeks into January and Nadia Rose has already set the bar so high with Highly Flammable, that it will be a challenge for any other emcee to compete. Don’t believe us? Click the badge in the header to buy the EP on iTunes, or stream on Spotify below.