Dylan Mills would have noted the irony when he woke to a frenzy outside his home on September 10, 2003, just a few days before his 19th birthday. The previous evening, he’d won the Mercury Prize for his debut album as Dizzee Rascal, Boy in da Corner—an unflinching portrait of life for young Black people feeling abandoned and disenfranchised in some of London’s toughest quarters. Now, the UK’s press had gathered at his East London high-rise. The scrum was so demanding, he had to call on a more media-savvy friend, professional footballer Danny Shittu, to help negotiate it. “My album was about feeling outcasted and having all this angst and rage,” he told Apple Music in 2016. “And then, I got embraced by the world.” Today, the record stands as a foundational pillar of grime, a sound that offered street-level authenticity as a stark alternative to the escapist champagne rhythms of UK garage. But if other benchmarks, such as Wiley’s Treddin’ on Thin Ice, were cold, claustrophobic pieces, Boy in da Corner promised that grime could be anything it wanted to be. Ever since Mills began forging beats on a PlayStation in the late ’90s, his process had been to experiment and see what came out. He’d grown up loving punk, hard rock, and grunge alongside jungle, hip-hop, and R&B, and he poured those influences into these songs. “Fix Up, Look Sharp” uses one of hip-hop’s favorite breaks—from Billy Squier’s “The Big Beat”—and still sounds bracingly fresh, thanks to Dizzee’s Lydon-like hectoring. “I Luv U” twists crunk into churning, compelling chaos. And “Jezebel” gets its dripping-tap melodies from an attempt to replicate Foxy Brown’s “Get Me Home.” Around him, he surveys a landscape of knife crime, teenage pregnancy, and police brutality, bringing vulnerability and bravado, hurt and humor, weariness and optimism to his agile rhymes. Mills has rarely stood still since then. Within six years of his Mercury win, he was celebrating three consecutive UK No. 1 singles after repositioning himself as a dance-pop jester on such tracks as the Armand Van Helden collaboration “Bonkers.” When grime’s second wave penetrated the UK mainstream during the mid-2010s, the scene had followed his restless lead, producing albums as diverse and ambitious as Skepta’s Konnichiwa and Kano’s Made in the Manor. Naturally, Dizzee was soon bounding down his own lane again. This time, by rewiring grime’s early brutalism with 2017’s Raskit, always true to Boy in da Corner’s closing bars on “Do It!”: “Stretch your mind to the limit, you could do it.”