(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.