Skepta Sets the Table

 Album · Released 6 November 2026 · Hip-Hop/Rap

Skepta Sets the Table

The Fork and Knife, by Skepta

Fifteen songs, fifty-five minutes, and a back half that fills up with guests. On The Fork and Knife, Skepta hosts rather than declares — and the centre of gravity is not a single but “Belly”, eight minutes forty-nine of the whole scene at one table.

A fork and knife resting on a pale linen tablecloth in soft daylight
The Fork and Knife — Skepta. Illustration by Stephen Agorsor.

The title is the argument. A fork and a knife are not instruments; they are what you are handed when something is about to be served. Naming the record after the cutlery rather than the meal puts the emphasis on the eating — the appetite, the portions, the etiquette of who gets fed first. Skepta has been one of the defining voices in British grime for two decades, a co-founder of Boy Better Know and a Mercury Prize winner for Konnichiwa, and the interesting thing about The Fork and Knife is how little it behaves like the album of a man with nothing left to prove.

Fifteen songs, fifty-five minutes. That arithmetic matters, because the average track here runs well under four minutes — most of them closer to two and a half. The sprawl is in the number of courses, not the size of any single one. He stacks rather than stretches. Right up until the second-to-last song, nothing here is allowed to sit and stew.

The opening run is nearly all him. Secrets of Patriarchy opens cold, and through Currency, Pandora’s Box, Revenge and Gas Me Up (Diligent) the record stays lean and clipped — a kitchen, not a dining room. The exceptions arrive early and pointedly: Novelist on Outside, and, more unexpectedly, the Memphis veteran Project Pat on Cold Shower, a guest choice that reads less like a crossover play than a nod to where a certain kind of Southern rap menace came from in the first place.

Then the back half opens the door and the table fills up. Asake glides through Aloe Vera; Broken Hearts puts Central Cee and Jorja Smith on the same track and lets the contrast do the work; Innocent Smile hands five and a half minutes to Suggs and Chase & Status, the strangest guest list on the record and, for that reason, the one that tells you most about the mood. This is a man loosening his collar and letting the room in.

Belly is the centre of gravity. Eight minutes forty-nine, seven guests — Frisco, Bossman Birdie, Kibo, Mayhem Nodb, Jme, Kruz Leone and Queenie — on a record where almost everything else is over in under three. It is the one place the fork and knife get put down and people simply talk. On an album named after cutlery, a track called Belly — the word for the meal and for the gut that takes it — is not an accident. It reads as a census of a scene rather than a showcase: older Tottenham names and newer ones at the same table, each handed a verse and none of them introduced.

And then, deliberately, a two-minute-forty-five curtain call. Victory Lap refuses the obvious ending. After the posse cut, a lap of honour would have been easy; finishing on something this brief and this tidy is a choice, and it works. The record closes the way a good dinner does — plates cleared, no speech.

Not every course lands. Parts of the middle stretch pass without leaving a mark, and there are moments where the sequencing is doing more work than the song underneath it. But the arrangement is the statement. Where a younger Skepta wrote manifestos, this one hosts: he sets a table, decides who sits at it, and lets the company carry the argument. Fifteen songs in, the point is not that he still has bars. It is that he knows exactly who to hand the mic to.

Tracklist

  1. 1Secrets of Patriarchy3:37
  2. 2Outside (feat. Novelist)2:31
  3. 3Cold Shower (feat. Project Pat)3:13
  4. 4Currency3:37
  5. 5Pandora’s Box2:51
  6. 6Revenge3:59
  7. 7Magic (feat. Finessekid)2:32
  8. 8Gas Me Up (Diligent)2:51
  9. 9Melody3:49
  10. 10Aloe Vera (feat. Asake)2:51
  11. 11Chippie2:37
  12. 12Broken Hearts (feat. Central Cee & Jorja Smith)4:20
  13. 13Innocent Smile (feat. Suggs & Chase & Status)5:30
  14. 14Belly (feat. Frisco, Bossman Birdie, Kibo, Mayhem Nodb, Jme, Kruz Leone & Queenie)8:49
  15. 15Victory Lap2:45

Total running time 55 minutes. Tracklist as published on Apple Music.

Verdict

A host’s album, not a hero’s — and “Belly” is the best argument for it.

Listen on Apple Music 

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