You wouldn’t know it from listening, but Master Peace’s debut album was created under a cloud of chronic illness and doubt. At the time he was making the raucous, ambitious ‘How To Make A Master Peace’, Peace Okezie was just learning that he suffers from peripheral neuropathy, a condition that causes nerve pain and frailty and numbness in his limbs. Team that with a romantic break-up and fighting against a career of being pushed into boxes he didn’t fit in, and he knew he needed to come out swinging.
“I was kind of going through the thick of it,” he tells NME from Los Angeles, where he’s working on new tracks for a deluxe edition of the LP. “I was dealing with all this while also being a young person still trying to live my life. The only way I could ever get out of it was through the songs.”
Okezie’s way out of it, as demonstrated on the fantastic debut album, was through unfiltered energy and the channeling of his indie heroes. Early Master Peace performances on 2018 debut single ‘Buck Me’ and his appearance on Tim & Barry TV earned the descriptor as a “punk rapper” by NME in 2019, but pointed to the future with the quote: “I’m what a rock star looks like.”
“I was just too busy doing what everybody else wanted me to do,” he reflects now of his past work. “It definitely stunted my growth. I’ve always wanted to be an indie artist, but there was always someone in my ear saying, ‘No, don’t do that. That ain’t cool’. Even friends of mine, who I love to death, would say, ‘Nah, bro, they will only push a certain demographic of people. They ain’t gonna push a black artist doing this type of music’. It got to a point where I believed it.”
In the end, it was unwavering self-confidence that brought Master Peace back to the music of his youth, and to a debut album that marks him out as an indie star for a new generation. As all the biggest stars of the genre past and present do, he’s got the ambition and the quotes to back it up. “I remember when Arctic Monkeys’ first album came out. It was a real moment in time, and was a cultural reset,” he says. “I wanted to make an album that’s a cultural reset for Gen Z kids of the current day and age. I want them to say, ‘When this album came out, it changed the way we all thought.’”
Fortunately, ‘How To Make A Master Peace’ has the hits to back up the bravado. From the moment ‘Los Narcos’ rushes out of the gate like an eager greyhound, the giddy energy and intensity never lets up. ‘Lodge’ is a swaggering high point, while ‘I Might Be Fake’ – assisted by Georgia – is blistering nu-rave revivalism with all of the attitude and sweat of its pioneers. ‘GET NAUGHTY!’, which justifies both its all-caps title and exclamation mark, is another sleazy triumph.
Peace recently toured with The Streets, and has ambitions of becoming the same type of unhinged, chaos-creating live performer as Mike Skinner, who has also become somewhat of a mentor. “I played him a bit of my album and asked what he thought,” he says. “[Skinner] was like, ‘Don’t worry about what I think, and don’t worry about what everyone else thinks’ Worry about what you think. I asked him how [‘Original Pirate Material’] managed to stand the test of time,” Peace adds. “He’s like, ‘Because I didn’t care what people thought when I first made it, I just made it because I like that type of music. I wasn’t trying to get a hit, I was just trying to make good music that people will resonate with that will then change my life, which it did’.
“You’re just making music that you like, and that you’re into,” Skinner told Okezie. “People will gravitate to it if you believe that they will.”
In making the album and undergoing this sonic shift, Okezie felt he was deliberately going against the zeitgeist, making music he was told by others was outdated and unfashionable. Since then though, indie sleaze has become a buzzword again and the chaotic, sex-fuelled songs of The Dare are making headlines and filling rooms. After the album was finished, more sets of ears gravitated towards the classics of ‘00s indie, with the soundtrack to Emerald Fennell’s Saltburn turning younger listeners onto Bloc Party and MGMT, as well as Sophie Ellis Bextor. “It’s one of those happy accidents,” Okezie grins.
Growing up in rural Surrey after moving from South East London as a child, Okezie was torn between the indie staples he was hungrily consuming and his childhood interest in the UK rap scene. ‘Shangaladang’, a loose and languid highlight from the album, quotes Skepta and reflects on his early days in London, which stood in stark contrast to the suburbia where he ended up spending most of his childhood.
“I’ve never really spoken about my childhood,” he says, “but I grew up around people that were involved in crime. That song is about people that I used to be friends with that were about that life. There’s people that rap about it, and there’s people that live it. Those people live it, they live that life through and through. People would say that I’m a sweet boy from Surrey who ain’t going through nothing. But I’ve seen some shit that makes you question whether I’m doing the right thing, if I’m even supposed to be a musician.”
‘How To Make A Master Peace’ is an escape, then, from things past and present that have held Okezie back. It’s also an early contender for the best British debut album of 2024, an album of rare energy and charisma that wants to change the world, and could conceivably do so for a small corner of it.
“I feel like I’m a dark horse,” he concludes of his place in the industry. “Everybody knows the bands that the industry is putting to the forefront, and I don’t need to name names. Then I’m here like, come and join this train!’” Falling – with his infectious and ever-present enthusiasm – into a football analogy, he adds: “Sometimes I feel like I’m sitting on a bench waiting to get put on in the 90th minute. I’m like, ‘Nah, man, I want to play the full game’. I’m gonna get that first team play, man, I can feel it.”
Master Peace’s debut album ‘How To Make A Master Peace’ is out now