Grime
The 9 Best Grime
Tracks of All Time
London MC music built on cheap software at 140 BPM, born on pirate radio in the east of the city around 2002. Square-wave basslines, no swing, and a vocal delivery that treats the beat as something to fight.
- Origin
- East London, 2002
- Tempo
- 138–142 BPM
- Also known as
- eskibeat, eski, sublow, 8-bar
- Tracks
- 9
- Updated
- 2026-08-29
Listen to the whole list
Play it through here →One record after another, with the verdicts
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Opens the list on YouTube as a playlist you can save to your own account. We never see your account, and nothing is stored here. 3 of these records have no verified YouTube link yet, so they are left out rather than guessed at.
Number 1: Musical Mob / Pulse X
2002
Two notes, a square wave and almost no other content. Usually named as the first grime record, and the reason an entire scene decided that a beat could be this bare and still work.
Number 2: Dizzee Rascal / I Luv U
2002 · XL
Made at sixteen on a school computer. A row between two teenagers about a pregnancy, over a beat that sounds like the argument, and nothing in British music had sounded that unmediated before.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Number 3: Wiley / Eskimo
2002 · Wiley Kat
The instrumental that named a subgenre and set the emotional temperature: cold, hollow, and deliberately unwelcoming. Wiley's whole theory of the music is audible in ninety seconds.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — Ghosts, The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred
Number 4: Lethal Bizzle / Pow! (Forward)
2004 · Relentless
Eight MCs, one relentless beat, and a record banned from so many venues that the ban became part of its reputation. The genre's most efficient demonstration of what a posse cut is for.
Number 5: XTC / Functions on the Low
2004
A mournful string figure over a beat with nothing in the middle. Ignored for a decade, then rediscovered as the backing for Stormzy's Shut Up, which is a fair verdict on how good it always was.
Number 6: Wiley / Wot Do U Call It?
2004 · XL
A single whose entire subject is the argument about what to call this music. Wiley refuses garage, refuses urban, and in refusing them names the thing by negation.
Number 7: Jammer featuring Wiley, Kano, D Double E and Durrty Goodz / Destruction VIP
2006
The clash record. Four of the best MCs in London taking turns over one beat, with D Double E's verse still cited as the high-water mark for the form.
Number 8: Skepta & JME / That's Not Me
2014 · Boy Better Know
The comeback, and a public apology for a decade of chasing American pop. Made for eighty pounds, on purpose, and it reset the scene's standards overnight.
Number 9: Skepta / Shutdown
2015 · Boy Better Know
Grime as a fully confident export, with the beat still built from almost nothing. Thirteen years after Pulse X, the genre's commercial peak sounds no less austere than its beginning.
Also on The Waxonia Desk — The Hundred