A Brit-bred Slim Shady? Another The Streets? He’ll be sold to you as both and although the Mike Skinner comparison is a lazy untruth, with his bold debut Plan B (aka Ben Drew) leaves the former trailing in terms of raw impact. This white boy tale-spinner from East London does owe an awful lot to Eminem, from the quick-spat-take-that fury of his microphone style (quasi-American accent to boot), to the bounce of his backing tracks, to taking the role of participatory narrator, devil’s advocate and instigator. But every aspect that’s been neutralised, parodied or packaged to turn Mathers into a one-man industry is exaggerated and left red-raw here, with an added vulgarity that must be sending Mary Whitehouse’s obscenity antennas cuckoo as we speak.

"Tough Love" is one of the clearest reasons for the Eminem comparison, recalling in tragic detail one set of parents’ perverse sense of discipline and the ensuing death of their daughter. One thing that sets him apart though is avoiding the solely self-referential cataloguing of his own existence, instead seeing the wider world and all of its wounds from his perspective. It’s no mistake that he sounds like he’s stolen Zack de la Rocha’s tongue in "No More Eatin". But this is no international project – in his own words, his style is "like Little Mo getting raped and keeping the baby instead of getting it aborted". The only thing that should stop this from going supanova is not having Dr Dre on speed-dial and Radio 1 not owning a durable enough bleep-machine. --James Berry