(Columbia)
The debut album from the British star finds him rapping rings around even high-profile guest stars as he asserts his place at hip-hop’s high table

The business of reviewing the debut album by Central Cee entails a level of security you seldom encounter in 2025: no information is provided beyond the tracklist. His record label seems at a loss to tell you who produced it, there are no lyrics to clarify the knottier moments of the rapper’s famously torrential flow; the details of some of the guest artists – the owner of the Billie Eilish-esque voice on Now We’re Strangers, or the potent soul vocal on closer Don’t Know Anymore – is also apparently classified. But perhaps security isn’t really the point: artists who are really concerned about pre-release leaks just drop their albums unannounced. The whole palaver seems more about promoting the idea that Can’t Rush Greatness is a very big deal indeed.

Well, of course it is. If some of the claims regarding Central Cee’s success and its spoils on Can’t Rush Greatness sound suspiciously like the lily being gilded – Does he really employ a private chef? Is it correct, as guest Skepta proudly claims on Ten, that he’s among the 10 biggest rappers in the world? – he’s still, unquestionably, the dominant name in UK rap. Private chef or not, the home counties pile that Can’t Rush Greatness says Oakley Neil Caesar-Su now calls home must be running out of wall space for the number of platinum discs he’s amassed over the last four years. Moreover, Central Cee has done the one thing no one really expected a British rapper to do, and succeeded in the ice-to-eskimos business of breaking America. “Nobody else from London’s gone Hollywood,” he swaggers on CRG, as you might if you had thus far scored three platinum US singles. It’s an achievement not entirely without precedent, although you’d have to go back 35 years, to the handful of US hits scored by Monie Love, to find a British rapper who achieved anything even remotely comparable.

Dug out of the vault for a 40th anniversary version of Private Dancer, this glossy rock track gains much-needed rawness from Turner

In a world where august artists’ back catalogues have become big business, the music industry has become impressively adept at convincing people to shell out for yet another version of albums they already own. The deluxe edition has been supplanted by the super-deluxe edition. Once, albums were merely remastered to sound better, but now they’re entirely deconstructed then reassembled in surround sound, ultimate mixes, even – in the case of John Lennon’s Mind Games – as a beatless ambient aid to meditation.

Accordingly, you might have thought that the sessions for Tina Turner’s 1984 solo breakthrough Private Dancer had been thoroughly ransacked a decade ago, by a 30th anniversary edition that appended 15 extra B-sides, out-takes, live recordings and adjacent songs to the original album. But that would underestimate the indefatigability of record companies when it comes to parting fans from their cash. For Private Dancer’s slightly belated 40th anniversary – its first major anniversary since its author’s death in 2023 – the album is expanded to a mind-boggling five discs of material, the attention-grabbing jewel among which is a hitherto unknown track from the archives: Hot for You Baby. But unlike Face It Alone, the previously unreleased song appended to the similarly extensive “collector’s edition” of Queen’s penultimate album The Miracle in 2022, Hot for You Baby doesn’t seem to have been left unfinished and subsequently polished up.