I’ve been enjoying the rise and rise of UK hip-hop over the last few years, and have critiqued a number of stand-out tracks along the way. But this one is something really special, with extraordinarily sophisticated performances from both rappers, especially as regards their rhythmic phrasing.

Partly it’s just the intricacy and variety of rhythms on offer, skittering between straight and syncopated sixteenths via clusters of 32nd notes, with occasional moments of triplets (eg. Stormzy’s “Viola” at 2:00 or Dave’s “buy her a car like a” at 3:22) and even quintuplets on “crocodile bag I” during the choruses. (To clarify, for the sake of discussion I’m assuming a four-four time signature at 70bpm.) There are those unpredictable and dramatic changes in pacing too, such the stream of patter at 2:10 or the sudden hiatuses after “vending one” (2:37) and “Jordan woods” (3:10).

But above all, for me it’s the playful way both rappers toy with the placement and frequency of the little three-syllable end-of-phrase cadence ending with the word “one(s)” – firmly established in our minds during the opening chorus with “Jordan ones”, “more than one”, “thirty-one”, “forty-one”, and so on. However, where less imaginative rappers might have slavishly followed the model of those first four instances and planted the cadence’s final syllable on beats one and three every time, what we get at 0:19 is a longer phrase (“stick him up with a stick, stick, he drew the shorter one”) which only delivers its cadence on the third beat of bar three. A similar trick’s used for “Tory putting in Labour, this that Jeremy Corbyn one”, and the same concept plays out during the subsequent verses (eg. Dave at 0:54 with “Who’s got a new vest? Man, pop that show, no microphone” and Stormzy at “My bros don’t chat, we just wear all black on a blend in one”). Stormzy later extends the idea further with the longer phrases at 2:23 (“They’ve got the new Aston Martin plug, could you send me one? And he said “no need to be renting one.”) and 2:33 (“Man are talking war, don’t know ‘bout war till you end in one, the machine got sweets and I’m vending one.”).

Returning to the chorus again, you can hear Dave syncopating the cadence’s sixteenths for “Jorja one” (0:28) and dotting them for “slaughter one” (0:32), which is another device that reappears in the verses, with Dave syncopating for “My left wrist is sixty-one” (1:12), and Stormzy giving us a series of four syncopations from “twenty one” (2:16) to “Fenty one” (2:22). But my favourite developments appear later, as the cadence takes on other lyrics. At 2:46 “walk downstairs” starts off a different rhyme scheme that proceeds through “mortgage cleared”, “all our peers”, “all these years”, “all I hear”, and “a ball with flair”, until suddenly Stormzy fakes us out by failing to deliver the downbeat for “off the set they storm like…” at 2:56, a move that intensifies the celebrity punchline “storm like Piers” when it finally arrives two beats later. And then he follows it up with the first clearly off-beat cadence on “morning tears”, shifting the final syllable to the bar’s final eighth note.