Honour may or may not have grown up in the US, making beats with a cousin who sang in a church band. They might have toured as a roadie with platinum-selling R&B outfit Pretty Ricky before acing regional video game tournaments and moving to NYC. They could have sold their life story to children’s book author C.S. Adler and signed to Violator management, and maybe they ended up stationed in London, working as a runner on music promos. Whatever the plausibility, the breadcrumb trail provides us with a detailed cultural framework for their art, a dense fog of pop and underground references that is as inescapable as it is enticing. Honour’s music engulfs even the most cautious listener, sweeping through tongue-in-cheek Wild West bravado and psychedelic, overdriven club rap, bifurcating into crumbly DIY noise and vaporous euphoric soul. Sometimes barbed and cynical, but just as often deliriously warm-hearted, it is a web of contradictions that is as puzzling to unpick as the artist’s baffling backstory, imprinted with more hidden messages than a Renaissance painting.
Artist
