In November 2022, one year into an 11-year prison sentence for firearm charges, Birmingham rapper Marnz Malone was hanging out with his friends during “sosh”, or association time, on his wing. One of them, a boxer, was preaching the benefits of fitness training, explaining how he’d improvised an exercise using some equipment he had. Malone noticed the man living in the cell next to him showing a keen interest and asking questions. At the time, he thought little of it.
“We didn’t know that he’d just shown the man how to kill himself,” Malone says on a Skype call. “It traumatised so many of us.”
This incident inspired the 25-year-old’s latest single, I Hate January, out this week. The music video follows the perspectives of two young men experiencing mental health crises in their cells, leading one to take his own life. Text at the start of the video explains that 88 suicides were recorded in the UK prison system in the last year, an average of one every four days.
“I feel like I’ve got a responsibility to show people what’s really going on in here,” says Malone (whose real name is Kimani Shaw). “It’s easy to look at my scenario and think that prison is nice” – Malone has recorded and released all three of his acclaimed full-length releases from prison, including Tina’s Boy, which reached No 66 in the UK album charts last year. “Or that we’re glamorising it. But this is not a nice place.”
Marnz Malone, also known as Double M, enters 2025 as one of the most talked-about rappers in the UK. His process is remarkable: he sits in his cell penning intricate, pained bars about life, love and death, always in silence – “without the distraction of instruments, or feeling the need to rap in a certain way … I make sure I write down exactly how I am feeling” – then performs them down the phone to a trusted circle of engineers who lay them over stripped-back, melancholic beats before releasing them into the world.
Like the crackle of an old vinyl, sharpened by the poetic potency of his storytelling, Malone’s lines have an analog rawness – and an ever-growing fanbase, including peers such as Nines (whose chart-topping 2024 album Malone featured on), Potter Payper and Central Cee. Malone deals precisely and sensitively with the harsh trappings of road and prison life, disregarding drill’s myopic nihilism – he evolved out of the troubled genre’s late-2010s golden era – and commercial UK rap’s potential for shallow glamour. He is a rapper’s rapper, and crowded cell freestyle videos and songs like Ball 4 U or Free Dior, which intimately mourn friends and wish for better days, have generated tens of millions of streams.
“It’s bittersweet,” he says. “Being in jail means I can take it in, I have time to think. In here, I’m no different to anyone else, which keeps me grounded. I could have £20m in my bank, but I can still only spend £20 a week. Every day, my door gets unlocked at the same time as everyone else; we all eat and go to the gym at the same time. But it’s sad because I’m not out to experience it fully. There are rappers I’ve worked with that I didn’t even get to meet.”
His love of words is deep-rooted. He was born in Spanish Town, Jamaica, and his father died when he was two; his mother relocated to Newtown, Birmingham, where Malone later joined her (the photograph on the cover of Tina’s Boy shows the moment they reconnected). At school he was bullied for speaking patois, so he would focus in English lessons, soon developing a love for quirky vocabulary – he cites “aglet”, the casing at the end of a shoelace, as an example – and writing his busy thoughts down on paper to make sense of them. “Reading is an escape. It’s how my mind works, it comes naturally. I like to know information and have knowledge,” he says. He is grateful for studying Michael Morpurgo’s 1982 novel War Horse, which makes sense given the motif of war that’s threaded through his lyrics (his first mixtape was titled Trenchfoot). He names Redemption by Stan “Tookie” Williams, founder of the Los Angeles gang the Crips who was executed in 2005, and Paulo Coelho’s The Alchemist as books that have since inspired him whilst incarcerated.
I Hate January features his close friend and fellow prison-based UK rap success story KayMuni and is named as such because the month marks the birthday of Malone’s friend Nasir Patrice, as well as the day he was murdered in 2020, two weeks shy of turning 18. It is the first single from his fourth full-length project Sabr, scheduled for release on Valentine’s Day.
The cover art of Malone’s acclaimed 2023 project Maktub (“it is written” in Arabic) used a cartoon version of the mugshot that was taken and circulated in the press after he’d been released from hospital having been stabbed 20 times, arrested and charged in 2021: Malone had pointed a gun at rival gang members, and was found guilty of possession of a firearm with intent to endanger life. He says that the Sabr cover will have the same style of portrait, but depicting him as he is now. “Time has moved on. Now I have facial hair and scars on my face,” he says, adding that Sabr means “patience” or “perseverance” in Arabic (his lyricism and branding is peppered with Islamic reference).
Everyone involved in the creation of I Hate January, “from KayMuni, to the guy who shot the video, to the guy who mixed and mastered it, has a personal experience of suicide,” Malone explains. When I ask why it is so prevalent in UK prisons, he asks if he can read out some words written by one of his friends who has been in prison for 19 years. “I have to make sure this gets heard – because if I don’t, who will?”
The piece he reads out rails persuasively against prisons’ lack of mental health support, normalised drug use, and cramped space; the way so many people in prison become isolated from their support network on the outside; and the UK government, for their fear of the media, and for their failure to provide rehabilitation. He quotes the prison and probation ombudsman Adrian Usher, who made a call for greater access to phones last summer: “When I am investigating the circumstances of a self-inflicted death in prison, far too frequently, I find that the inmate had no credit on their phone account,” Usher said. “If, in their darkest hour, prisoners had the ability to contact a friend or a family member, would they have made a different choice?”
I ask Marnz what one thing he would do to alleviate prisoners’ mental health. Better training for prison officers, he replies. “I have a good relationship with the people I have to live around: officers, governors, whoever. But I think they could start by making sure staff can recognise when someone’s suffering to address situations appropriately.”
“Prison is not a place for rehabilitation. The only reason I have rehabilitated is because of music; without it, I don’t know what I would have done. I would probably be thinking about going home to a life of crime to survive. Not everybody gets the break I’ve got,” he finishes passionately. “That’s why every day I wake up and tell myself to remember two things: be humble and complete the mission. Until I’m out of here, I don’t feel like my rap career has even started yet.”
• In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counselor. In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
