Central Cee’s Drill EP Credits an Eighteenth-Century Composer
5 min read
The opening track of Central Cee’s new EP lists seven writers. Two of them are Tomaso Albinoni, a Venetian composer who died in 1751, and Remo Giazotto, an Italian musicologist who died in 1998.
All Roads Lead Home came out on 27 March through CC4L and Columbia, running seventeen minutes and eighteen seconds across seven tracks. It is his fifth solo EP.
The Two Names in the Credits
Albinoni and Giazotto appear together for one reason. They are the pair of names conventionally attached to the Adagio in G minor, one of the most recognisable pieces of string writing in existence.
Its authorship is a genuine scholarly problem. The Adagio is a 1958 neo-Baroque composition by Giazotto, an Albinoni biographer, who claimed to have built it from a manuscript fragment — a few measures of melody and figured bass — obtained from the Saxon State Library in Dresden after the Second World War.
Whether that fragment ever existed is still debated, with some scholars treating the affair as a musical hoax. What is not disputed is that everything in the piece other than the bass line is Giazotto’s own work.
So a UK drill track opens by crediting an eighteenth-century composer who may have contributed nothing to the source material, alongside a twentieth-century writer who probably wrote all of it. That is a more interesting credit line than most albums produce in their entirety.
The mechanics of how it got there are ordinary enough. A publisher registers the Adagio under both names, so any track built on it inherits both, regardless of what the musicology says. Clearance is a legal process rather than a scholarly one.
Musically, the choice makes sense of itself. Drill is built on sparse, minor-key melodic figures over sliding sub-bass, and a mournful string melody in G minor sits inside that palette without adjustment. The genre has been raiding classical and orchestral sources for years for exactly this reason.
What is unusual is the specificity. Choosing a piece whose own authorship is contested, for a track called “Iceman Freestyle”, is either coincidence or a very dry joke about what counts as original.
Seventeen Minutes, Eleven Charts
The runtime is the other number that stands out. Seven tracks in seventeen minutes and eighteen seconds averages under two and a half minutes each, with the longest — “Iceman Freestyle” — at 3:06 and the shortest, “Y Fi Dat”, at 2:03.
That is short even by drill standards, and it is a deliberate shape rather than a shortfall. A record of this length is designed to be played through repeatedly rather than dipped into, and each track is over before a listener has a chance to decide whether to skip.
It charted widely for a release that brief. It reached 10 in Portugal, 22 in New Zealand, 26 in Australia and 5 on the Australian hip-hop and R&B chart, 27 in Switzerland, 34 in the United Kingdom, 40 in Nigeria, 63 in Lithuania, 67 in Austria, 85 in Canada, 98 in Ireland and 127 in Belgium.
Eleven countries plus a genre chart, from seventeen minutes of music, describes a specific kind of career. Our piece on why hip-hop’s chart dominance is a story about catalogue depth covers the mechanics behind numbers like these.
Two Singles on Consecutive Days
The rollout was compressed to the point of being abrupt. “Iceman Freestyle” appeared on 12 February, and “Slaughter”, featuring J Hus, arrived on 13 February — the very next day, with presaves opening at the same time.
Releasing two singles twenty-four hours apart is unusual and informative. It removes the normal interval in which a first single is assessed, and it presents the record as a body of work rather than as a sequence of individual songs.
“Iceman Freestyle” also had a prior life. It was previewed in late 2025 during a Drake livestream teasing his own album, which means a substantial audience had heard it months before it was released.
That is an efficient piece of positioning. A track that circulates unofficially builds demand without a campaign, and issuing it as the lead single converts existing curiosity rather than manufacturing new interest.
A Release Date Chosen for Eid, Then Moved
The original release date was 19 March, set to coincide with the end of Ramadan. The EP was then delayed by a week to 27 March.
Timing a release to the end of Ramadan is a specific and rarely made choice in Western pop scheduling, where release weeks are set by chart cycles and competitor calendars rather than religious observance.
Losing that alignment to a week’s delay is the sort of thing that happens for ordinary logistical reasons and is worth noting precisely because the original intention was so deliberate.
The guest list is similarly compact. J Hus appears on “Slaughter” and A2 Anti also features, and the remaining tracks are solo — restraint on a record where a longer feature list would have been easy to assemble.
The J Hus pairing is the significant one. He is one of the defining voices of the previous wave of British rap, and putting him on the second track connects a drill record to the Afroswing and road-rap lineage that preceded it rather than treating drill as year zero.
Track titles fill out the same picture: “Wagwan”, “Feelings”, “DC10”, “Maka”, “Y Fi Dat”. The vocabulary is London and Caribbean rather than American, which is the distinction that has always separated UK drill from the Chicago sound it took its name from.
The Producers Are Where the Volume Is
What the EP does not economise on is production. Seven tracks carry credits from Chris Rich, Fumes Beats, Io, Ohnine, Yjay, Aaronorage, Gusto, LukasBL, Mason Beats, Macshooter49, BabyCashy, Jake Fridkis, Einer Bankz and Sam Beats.
Fourteen or more producers across seventeen minutes is close to one per ninety seconds. That is standard practice in contemporary rap, where beats are sourced widely and the artist’s job is selection rather than commissioning.
It also explains how a record this short can sustain repeated listening. With a different production team on almost every track, the sonic reset arrives constantly, and a seventeen-minute run never settles into one texture.
Following Can’t Rush Greatness from 2025 with an EP rather than another album keeps the release cadence high without the commitment of a full record — which, on this evidence, is a format he has worked out how to use.
The EP has become the default vehicle for that approach across UK rap. It carries enough material to be treated as a release rather than a loose single, and it can be assembled and issued inside a few months, which an album cannot.
Charting at 34 in Britain and 10 in Portugal illustrates the other half of the pattern. UK drill has an international audience that does not map neatly onto the home market, and a release can perform better abroad than at home without that being a failure.
Five solo EPs and six overall, alongside the albums, is a substantial body of work for an artist still early in a career. Whatever else the classical credit is, it is the sound of somebody with enough confidence to put an eighteenth-century string melody at the front of a drill record and expect it to work.
All Roads Lead Home is out now on CC4L and Columbia.
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