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Digga D finally has a bit of time to relax. The 23-year-old rapper put out a mixtape, Back to Square One, in August – his fourth in as many years – and might normally be expected to barrel straight into a tour van for the autumn, promoting the new songs in front of roaring crowds. Instead, he’s due to play just one gig, at London’s Royal Albert Hall, not far from where he grew up in Ladbroke Grove. Then, he plans to take a break. He’d originally wanted to give himself a year off, but decided that might be too drastic.
And so he’s recently let himself enjoy one of the simpler things in life: binge-watching You on Netflix with his girlfriend, from the start. “It’s crazy,” he says of the show, after cracking up. “Crazy, crazy, crazy – insane.” What else do they watch together? He thinks for a second. “Our favourite film is Love Don’t Cost a Thing. Have you seen that, yeah?” He jokes that his girlfriend’s had him watching “lover-boy” romcoms like that one, which starred R&B singer-actor Christina Milian, Nick Cannon and a classically early 2000s high school plot revolving around a popularity contest with a dash of horniness.
If you didn’t know more about the young rapper born Rhys Herbert, this could all sound a little banal. But Digga might not have had the chance to live this way. He’s had stints in prison, since being sentenced for conspiracy to commit violent disorder in 2018, a few weeks shy of his 18th birthday. Part of that case, involving other members of his west London drill collective 1011 (later renamed CGM), left Digga living under what’s known as a criminal behaviour order (CBO). It’s a piece of anti-antisocial behaviour law, brought in to replace the ASBO. A CBO can stop you from doing certain things and require you to do others. Courts can issue one when they believe, beyond reasonable doubt, that the person being sentenced has engaged in behaviour that caused others sufficient alarm, harassment and/or distress. You can be sent back to prison if you break the terms.
Under Digga’s CBO, he has 24 hours to notify the police of music he’s released, which can’t directly reference gang violence. The police may also monitor his social media. It’s complicated, but he’s essentially one of the only musicians in the country who has to factor the police into his creative expression.
Until the CBO expires in 2025, he’s still enmeshed in the criminal justice system. But, we’re not here to talk about all that. Most of the time, when Digga sits down with journalists, they comb through the details of his arrests and his time on probation (some probation restrictions were lifted in 2021). At this point in his career, as he grows from a deep-voiced, UK drill teen upstart to an intensely private young man, that’s less interesting than the artist he’s becoming.
Ultimately, his music anchors his life. You can consider that in two ways: it’s the method he first used to start expressing himself over icy beats in the mid-2010s. It’s now the launchpad from which he seems ready to grow beyond drill – and maybe even beyond rap altogether. He was named a figurehead of the UK drill scene after releasing 2019 tape Double Tap Diaries, and found more commercial success with its follow-ups, 2021’s Made in the Pyrex, and chart-topper Noughty By Nature in 2022. His star rose, even as he lived under the CBO conditions. On Back to Square One, he’s hitting the reset button.
I hear Digga before I see him. He’s on the phone in the hallway outside, the rumble of his voice carrying through the door of this high-ceilinged photo studio in central London. Once inside, phone still pressed to his ear, he turns to me, smiles and mouths an apology before ending the call. It’s the morning of his GQ shoot, which takes place in another part of this cavernous studio space. He has arrived looking fresh and cosy in a Broken Planet set (he pulls the hoodie off once we’re seated, with a quick “I’m kinda hot”), along with ginormous diamond chain and Louis Vuitton trainers.
The last time he was on stage at the Royal Albert Hall, he was still at school. “I did a rapping contest against other schools, and my school won,” he begins, his voice initially museum-quiet. “I actually won.” What was the rap about? “Mine was focused on crossing the road,” he says, chuckling. He can still pull a few bars from memory: “I said, ‘If you wanna cross the road / Use the green cross code / Wait, wait, wait / Til the green man shows / Stop, look and listen / Keep to the mission.” He breaks into a laugh.
I catch him in a calm, contemplative mood. It’s been just over a month since Back to Square One came out, and Digga says he’s feeling relieved. “People listen to my tape differently because it’s not a full drill tape.” It features what he calls “intellectual songs”, and others that might not sound like the firmly UK drill of his earliest work. He goes so far as to open the mixtape’s succinctly titled “Fuck Drill” with a sneer: “I don’t like drill no more, it’s tired.”
Single “TLC,” meanwhile, is a bop that leans back, sampling Dr Dre's 1999 posse cut “Xxplosive” to home in on a 2000s hip-hop sound. He shot parts of its video on holiday in Mexico, “on a little VHS camera. You wanna see it?” Pulling out one of two phones, he shows me a rough cut that splices between fuzzy, analogue footage from Mexico, and scenes shot in London (including one where a fan gets to briefly wear the Powis Square street-sign chain Digga’s got on today, a nod to where he grew up).
The song is all about how he’s saying: “I’m drained, I’m tired”, and needs a bit of TLC to recover from the pace of work. Director duo DonProd, made up of childhood friends Jack Millward and Tom Kral, both 23, have worked on at least nine Digga videos since early 2022, and directed some of “TLC.” Millward jokes that Digga’s self-shot footage turned out so well “it actually had us second-guessing whether Digga should be a director or a rapper.”
Overall, Kral calls Digga “a very authentic person. It’s not like we call ‘cut,’ and suddenly he’s acting different – to be completely honest, he’s very similar when the cameras are off to when they’re on.”
Digga credits his demeanour – what others may call “authentic”, but he’d not bother to analyse in that way – to the way he was raised. “I come from a Jamaican household, so when I was young, my grandma always used to say to me, ‘Don’t beg friends. Low the friends, da-da-da.’ So I literally grew up thinking everyone around me – not everyone around me, but the industry and stuff – is fake,” he says. “So I went my own way.” Beyond advice from his maternal grandmother, his parents’ music filled the house. Mostly reggae and soul courtesy of his dad, who Digga says DJ'd at the time, while mum was “all dancehall and slow jams; the Jagged Edges, you know?”
When his parents would put on music, Digga would dance, back when he was too young to really remember anything himself. “My dad had all these videos of me on his old Motorolas, going crazy in the car any time he’d play reggae music.” He smiles. Older cousins introduced him to rap, before he was downloading songs onto his BlackBerry via MP3 site Tubidy. “Before that, we used to Bluetooth songs to each other; songs you’d never expect bare children to have on their phones. Like, Ne-Yo,” and he laughs, before singing the hook to “Miss Independent” to himself. Family started his musical exploration, though, and I assume they still feed into his creativity today, I say. “Yeah! I wouldn’t be who I am without my family, innit?”
He’ll flip from a moment of this vulnerability, to insisting other people’s views on him aren’t a big deal. When I ask whether he anticipated the reaction to Back to Square One, he shakes his head. “I’ve grown to not care about anyone’s opinions,” he says, plainly. “When I first started doing music, I didn’t care about anyone’s opinions. A lot of people were against me actually doing music, and I didn’t care – obviously, because I kept doing it, and it worked out for me.” The way he sees it, this is his path. “I just do what I need to do and people that are supporting, or following the journey, will carry on supporting. I don’t really care about no one’s opinions.”
He ends a lot of sentences like this, summing up the point he’s just made. Others tend to tail off, after a “yeah” or two. Digga, though in a good mood this morning, isn’t necessarily chatty. You can tell that he doesn’t always like to retread his path from restless teen to rap star. What might come across as a reluctance to speak is really more of a slight wariness of interviews.
Digga seems more comfortable speaking directly to his fans online, whether on TikTok, Instagram or the regular vlogs that he posted on YouTube in the lead-up to Square One. In late 2022, he archived his Instagram account, going dark to get to work on the mixtape. “I said, ‘I’m putting my head down quickly,'” and for four months or so he spent most days in the studio. “That was a deep time for me,” he says, where he realised just how much ‘content creation’ had been central to his career. “[Social media] plays such a large part in being an artist because that’s where most of your following is. They wanna know what you’re thinking, they wanna know what you’re eating, they wanna go when you’re going to the gym, they wanna know everything.”
Now, he’s looking ahead, not only to the Royal Albert Hall gig, but to what he wants next. On a personal level, “just to chill and get healthy and drink water non-stop for a year. That sounds great – I don’t know if I’ll be able to do it – but I’d like to look after myself a little bit more.” He hints towards the end of our time together that he’d also like to be spoiled with a big romantic gesture for his birthday, or while on holiday. “It’s never happened!”
And professionally? “I always wanted to be an actor. Growing up, that’s what I saw: 50 Cent, Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube. I always felt like I wanted to get into that bag.” He hints at something in the works, but chuckles about an NDA and says he can’t share any more. Behind the camera, he sees opportunities too.
“I directed Unknown T’s last music video, so there’s more I wanna get into,” he says. “Hopefully I can do what Tyler Perry done. I grew up watching Madea Goes to Jail, Madea goes to this place, Madea goes to that place. Trust me.” As for the year-off-turned-break, he’s up for seeing more of the Caribbean. If all goes well, he’ll be sipping a strawberry daiquiri (his favourite cocktail) on a beach soon. “I’m doing good. I can’t complain.”
Digga’s lawyer, Cecilia Goodwin, has dialled in over Zoom on a nearby laptop, camera off (she never interrupts). Before Digga had arrived, Goodwin had told me it’s been amazing to watch him grow. “I had this kid, this 18-year-old, in prison, not sure about the world – all he had was his talent. Navigating the spaces we’ve had to, to get him to where he is in spite of this order where the police and the system want him to fail, has been difficult.” Over five years, she’s seen him balance both his CBO and a growing fandom.
Digga’s often asked to define his own success – how does he even take that question now? “I don’t know. I don’t know how to define it. I can’t even explain it,” he says, his voice tapering off. What about happiness? “My happiness is… I don’t know. Money can make me happy,” and now he smiles cheekily. “What is success to me? Health and wealth.”
Styling by Itunu Oke
Fashion Assistants: Melissa Ewing, Bea Bosley and Frank Foreman
Photographs by William Arcand
Grooming by Min Sandhu
Hairstyling by Venner James
