Master Peace: “A Black guy making indie still makes people look at you sideways”

Master Peace’s latest EP, Stupid Kids, opens with a distant guitar wail, before launching straight into a chaotic, headswinging guitar riff. With power chords and Master Peace’s urgent vocals, ​‘There’s No More Underground’ is rock music at its purest and most fun. Its closing sees him channel the likes of The Automatic or the Kaiser Chiefs at their raucous peak, chanting repeatedly:

“They’re cutting down the Amazon / To make more room for Amazon”

The track gives ​’00s indie sleaze golden era anthem, which if transplanted back 20 years, would have shaken bars and basements from Chalk Farm to Mornington Crescent. It sets the tone for a six-tracker that’s as diverse and explorational as it is retro-leaning. ​‘My Guitar’ embraces squelching acid synthesisers to create a dancefloor ready groove, while ​‘Fuck It Up (ft. Declan McKenna)’ strips away the distortion to create a hazy, late-summer track built for introspection.

Indie’s demise has often been attributed to a lack of new ideas, repetitiveness and the staling of a genre via quantity over quality – most famously by Andrew Harrison’s ​“landfill indie” label – but that certainly can’t be said of Master Peace, who refuses to stay still between one track and another. We wanted to find out about the forces that shaped him as an artist, so we asked him: ​“What made you?”

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I’ve always had this fire in me. I don’t really know where it came from. Maybe delusion, maybe confidence, maybe just stubbornness. But even when people were writing me off, I always felt like something bigger was meant to happen.

At school I was that kid teachers didn’t really know what to do with. Always talking, getting distracted, or doing something I probably shouldn’t be doing. They’d call me a ​“stupid kid” or say I just needed to focus more, but no one really clocked that my brain was doing 10 things at once and moving faster than everything around me. Later I found out I’ve got autism and ADHD, which made a lot of it make sense. Back then though, it just felt like I was constantly being told I was doing it wrong.

The funny thing is I actually really enjoyed learning. I was curious about everything, but my brain just didn’t want to sit quietly while it happened. Music was the one place where that chaos actually made sense.

I grew up in southeast London and my childhood wasn’t that different from a lot of kids around me. I saw things at a young age that I probably shouldn’t have seen, and it made me realise early on that that wasn’t the route I wanted to go down. I felt like there had to be something bigger waiting for me, even if I didn’t know what it was yet. Music became the thing that pulled me out of that world. It was like an anchor when everything else felt messy. Somewhere I could throw all the noise in my head.

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Around that time my life split into two completely different worlds. My family moved to Surrey while I was still at school, which was a massive culture shock. Imagine being a southwest London kid suddenly surrounded by quiet villages, and being one of the only Black kids in your school. I felt like an outsider straight away.

But weirdly that’s where I discovered the music that ended up shaping everything I make now. Back in London the soundtrack was grime and rap, Skepta, all of that energy. Then in Surrey I started hearing indie bands for the first time – Bastille, The 1975, and that whole 2000s indie sleaze era with Bloc Party and LCD Soundsystem. It felt massive. I’d hear songs like that on FIFA and think, this is what it’s all about.

It felt urgent, messy and full of energy, which was exactly how my brain felt. It reminded me of growing up, sneaking into places we weren’t meant to be and living a bit recklessly. I think a lot of the music I make now is just chasing that feeling.

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And then there were artists like Blood Orange. Seeing someone who looked like me existing in that world meant a lot. Because the reality is, a Black guy making indie music still makes people look at you sideways, like you’ve walked into the wrong room. Indie wasn’t really a place people expected me to exist in.

But I’ve always been a bit of a disruptor. If someone says I shouldn’t be somewhere, my instinct is to prove that I can be.

The ADHD side of my brain definitely plays into my music too. I’ll start 10 ideas at once, sometimes lyrics don’t even make perfect sense. But for me it’s not about perfect grammar or saying things the ​“right” way, it’s about the feeling. Having a brain that works differently means I see things through a different lens. It made me more perceptive and gave me a creative edge. Music lets me take all that energy I used to get in trouble for and turn it into something.

Now I’m at a place where I feel a freedom I didn’t have growing up. Through music, my voice and even fashion, I’m not trying to fit into someone else’s version of who I should be anymore.

And a big reason I do this is for people who feel like I did. Kids who were told they were too loud or too much. I want them to see that those things don’t have to be weaknesses. Honestly, I’m doing it for my younger self too. The kid who couldn’t sit still in class but knew deep down there was something waiting for him out there. Turns out he wasn’t wrong.

Stupid Kids by Master Peace is out now.

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