ArrDee needs to be taken more seriously

Brighton starboy Riley Davis is socially known as ArrDee and has always told us about his life before fame, working all day every day in Amazon Warehouse as well as working in a seaside town fish and chip shop. When asked by Metro he told them it was horrible and didn’t want to say too much, going on to shoutout Jeff Bezos as he said “Large up Jeff Bezos and them man there”. Letting us know that the working conditions are ‘mad’ and explained that because he was working with Amazon through lockdown and everyone was ordering everything, describing the work rate as ‘heavy’. But arguably, he always mentions the previous work in a grateful way as it made him put the effort into music to be able to get out of the warehouse.

ArrDee first jumped onto the scene in 2021 with his two-part freestyle ‘Cheeky Bars’ showing instantly that he’s from a seaside town and as the camera moves out you can see exactly where Davis comes from. He had previously told ‘For The Culture’ podcast that the video only cost £100 and explained that they had to film it so many times due to people walking past all the time. Little did he know, he was going to become one of the biggest artists of the year, as in April he had jumped on the biggest rap song of the year and arguably had the biggest verse on Tion Wayne and Russ Millions ‘Body (Remix)’. Riley was one of many talents on the track alongside Bugzy Malone, 3x3E1, ZT, Fivio Foreign, Darkoo, and Buni. To this day the track has over 113 million YouTube streams and the track became the first ever drill track to reach UK number one in the charts and is definitely ArrDee’s biggest song to date. His verse went global all over social media with his classic cheeky guy bars:

“Ayy, have you seen the state of her body? (Mad), If I beat it I ain’t wearin’ a johnny (Hah), Adeola wanna roll with a geezer (With a geez), Is it me or the lifestyle sweetheart?”.

ArrDee had told GRMDaily that he got to be a part of the remix as he ran into Tion Wayne and that Tion has been supporting the rapper from the beginning and had spoken with him a lot about the track, and ArrDee had said he ‘knew they were going to do a remix, because that’s what them man do’ stating that he had a feeling they were going to shout him, making sure people knew that the ‘remix wasn’t out of nowhere’ and ‘it was natural’. Letting GRMDaily know that he was aware that the track was going to be big as the original went crazy so why wouldn’t the remix?

Going on to team up with Fumez The Engineer for a very special Plugged In Session, surpassing a million views in twenty-four hours, and now has six million views and the fans loved it in the comments, for example, “the fact that this guy rapped about something more unique instead of just beef is amazing”, “like fresh air this kid. No guns, knives, or killing people just good old feel-good vibes. We need more like this and kids might start to look up to these lads and change the way things are now”, “Whether you like him or not, you have to admit he’s spitting straight fire”, and “This how it’s supposed to be, this man is telling me a story, love his energy”.

It is very clear and cleverly shown that ArrDee loves where he comes from and represents his town in all of his tracks, as do most rappers when it comes to supporting their area. Davies has come out and said multiple times that Brighton is a very welcoming town and you can be whoever you want there and get no judgement from anyone. He often talks about the number of different people you can find in Brighton and that Brighton has made his music career something more than rap, as he’s now a big character to have come out of the town and been able to represent, pathing the way for other talents in the seaside town. In his earlier music, Brighton was mentioned and shown in near enough every music track he had put out, being visual or lyrical, for example, he told GRMDaily that the location in his track “6 AM In Brighton” is a very popular place if you know Brighton and stated that it’s “where everyone gets lit”.

Arrdee went from this to topping charts, while sampling the club classic track ‘Flowers’ and it stuck to everything it touched, as it stayed in the charts for 19 weeks and obviously, the clubs loved it. Of course, the same love was shown online too, for example, the YouTube video, which is currently on 37 million views, had thousands of positive comments, like “Just came across this lad. He brings back originality with a bang. Not aggressive shite. Top stuff”, “His versatility, and consistency and that unique spice he offers on his music is remarkable'', and “arrdee has such a special vibe in every track, it’s so fresh”. It’s very fair to say that the track is up there with the remix in his top five biggest songs.

As ArrDee came on the scene, he got a lot of messages and comments comparing him to Manchester rapper Aitch. CapitalXtra said that they believe the comparisons are ‘almost expected’ as they do have a few similarities, one being they both at different moments had featured on a Tion Wayne X Russ remix track. Some may say that they both had the biggest verse on their remix tracks too. Another comparison would have to be the fact that the pair are both white rappers with the same haircut. After some time, the pair were rumoured to have had beef with each other online, however, ArrDee had told NME that they had been in contact with each other since ArrDee had jumped into the scene. The Brighton rapper had also said he was always asked when they were going to come together in the booth and make a track. He went on to tell NME that the pair had “linked up and went to the studio” and wanted to write a track to “spin the narrative that the media had done about us beefing each other”. The track was able to let ArrDee show more of his struggles before his music career started and Aitch just did what Aitch does best, as per usual. The fans had been begging for this track since the comparisons started, some of which had read “This is what we’ve been wanting. LETS GO”, “They both outdid themselves. straight bars”, and “Together they go bang on”.

It was only right that ArrDee announced his debut mixtape ‘Pier Pressure’ which was to be released on March 18th, 2022. In the build-up to his tape, he put out two tracks that were shown as a story, one being called ‘Come & Go’ and the other ‘Early Hours’, before the first track was released, a video surfaced on social media of a woman claiming that she woke up next to a sleeping ArrDee, comments started flying around, until ArrDee took to Instagram with a music video trailer and the caption “Lol you lot really thinking I’d get caught lacking” if there’s one thing he’s good at, its definitely marketing. The track featured a very versatile version of Davies that we weren’t aware of, a few melodic tracks, and of course the hip-hop rap tracks we know and love. During the week of release, he took to Instagram with a photo of him celebrating all of his hard work and the caption

“Suns out and we’re CELEBRATING BRIGHTON STYLE. In less than a year… 5 TOP 10s. 7 TOP 20s & MY FIRST EVER BODY OF WORK #2 IN THE CHARTS!! I was just a seaside kid sat in a dinger rapping, now we constantly making history, it was close and you lot made the difference. This is only the beginning, fuckin proud of the tape and I’m glad you lot are still with me. WE LITTY 4 REALLI.”

ArrDee spent the rest of his year on tour, festival sets, and releasing music videos for his favourite tracks on his tape, showing a lot of creative ability. He had also released a track with Tion Wayne ‘24 Hours In Lagos Freestyle’ and his summer track ‘Hello Mate’ and had released his own alcoholic rum drink ‘Litty Liquor’.

Davies opened 2023 with a post on Instagram, telling everyone he wants to see the worst hate comments in the comments of his picture. Jumping ahead to January 26th as ArrDee released track ‘Loser’, in which he basically told his haters to shut up and let them know he’s never going to lose. The visuals for this were very creative as always, with himself sitting on his iconic sofa chair watching television with clips of himself, in which he was pretending to be a hater talking about himself through the comments people had previously left. Another shot was shown as a tower of boxes and rubbish with ArrDee on top of the mess, representing him being at the top with all of the negative items below him. Again, the fans went wild in the YouTube comments, saying all kinds of lovely things, for example, “He’s gone further than most at a faster pace, you literally cannot hate someone who’s got the most love”.

Just last week we saw ArrDee’s latest track with the incredible Cat Burns ‘Home From My Heart’. The Track shows a deeper side to the rapper as he talks about how he really feels after having been grinding to get to where he is today. The fact that the track features Cat Burns, makes the track bigger than it would have been as Burns has a completely different audience that may not have listened to any of Davies’ music before, making this another very clever move in his career. The track has gone huge on TikTok and in our opinion, deserves a top ten this week.

Shout out ArrDee, make sure you stream ‘Home From My Heart’ and let us know what you’d like to see from him this year in the comments!