Talking all things rap with the Bury St Edmunds MC ready to bury any MC...
It’s a balmy Friday afternoon and George “Pozzy” Possnett is running late for our conversation. Still, it’s hard to fault someone who’s journeyed from a Suffolk teenager — immersed in drum & bass, ‘90s rap and countless plays of Dave’s Six Paths EP — to becoming one of the UK’s fastest-rising voices. One minute you’re obsessing over records in your bedroom; the next, you’re an internet sensation, shelling BBC 1Xtra with “one bar that’ll send you to surgery.” Acclaim quickly follows for your storytelling prowess, with tracks like the jazz-tinged Step on the Train and the mellow grime standout Might Go Out, the latter legging it past half a million streams. So yeah, a packed schedule feels pretty justified.
After the most profuse apologies, Pozzy greets me with a calm, self-assured demeanour, ready to chat. Naturally, I ask about his ascent. Like Tony “Scarface” Montana, getting to the top of his game was the easy bit. At heart, though, Pozzy is more of a sportsman than a kingpin. “I’m naturally quite competitive,” Pozzy asserts. “When I get on stage, I’m not thinking, ‘This is sick.’ I’m thinking, ‘I need to leave it all out there.’” The Scarface comparisons end here, but the movie talk doesn’t. Instead, Pozzy turns the conversation to the McLovin-shaped elephant
in the room. The McLovin comparisons, it turns out, date back to lockdown, when a 14-year-old Pozzy was told he looked like the Superbad cult hero at his local skatepark, before he’d even seen the 2007 comedy. Pozzy laughs off the nickname that later followed him onto TikTok. “Playing into that character helped me grow early on, but I’ve grown past leaning into the joke.” Ask Pozzy to define his sound, though, and he resists easy stick-on labels. “It stems from grime but pulls from jazz, hip-hop, garage and jungle. I’d call it alternative hip-hop. People say mellow grime, but it’s getting jazzier, so it’s hard to box in,” he says. Pozzy pauses, ruminating on where his sound sits within grime 3.0 and the wider UK underground. “I think the ‘underground’ is almost a sound now. There’s that kind of fakemink sound, but my scene is people like Saiming, scruz, Floetic and namesbliss: the list is endless. At the end of the day, we’re all just friends, everyone wants everyone else to do well and there’s plenty of space for that, which is cool.” That, perhaps, is the Pozzy paradox: a wordsmith who balances fierce competitiveness with a truly earnest, collaborative spirit.
Pozzy, Saiming and t.o’s Levels is out now.
Read the full feature in RWD Magazine Issue
133
Read the full feature in RWD Magazine Issue
133
