Boy in da Corner by Dizzee Rascal

Boy in da Corner, Dizzee Rascal's debut album, came out on XL Recordings on 21 July 2003, and it sounds like nothing British rap had ever put out before. Dizzee produced it himself, a teenager out of the grime underground building tracks out of jagged, bleeping, off-kilter beats and firing words over them at a nervous, breakneck clip. It's claustrophobic, funny and furious all at once, and "Fix Up Look Sharp" is its swaggering calling card.

The critics fell over themselves, ranking it among the year's best-reviewed releases, and it walked off with the Mercury Prize. Commercially it got as high as 23 in the UK, moved a quarter of a million copies around the globe by 2004 and eventually went platinum. More than that, it dragged grime out of the underground and into the mainstream, and made Dizzee the first UK emcee with an international name. Plenty now call it the best British hip-hop album ever made. America got it the following year; Showtime followed in 2004.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.