In the weeks after his mother died, Tony Bontana sequestered himself in the apartment that doubles as his studio, located in an office block in Selly Oak, Birmingham. There, he worked on his album L’Humanité, often through the night, tussling with his grief over a symphony of manipulated gospel and quiet-storm loops.

“I remember recording Sittin’ on a Star (Freestyle), unable to get through a verse without crying,” he says today, over a cup of tea in a London cafe. “It was literally all I could do. Writing and performing give me that instant outlet, and it really helped. It’s vital to my survival, to be able to work through these emotions, to talk about them.”

Bontana is an underground MC who deals in emotions and vulnerability; a visionary beatmaker with an unmistakable style who’s cooked up tracks for US luminaries such as Lil B and Billy Woods; and overall, a restless creative who switches between genres as his mood takes him. By 2024, when he released L’Humanité, his Bandcamp page already hosted dozens of tracks and albums, with Bontana putting out each one almost as soon as he’d finished recording it, “regardless of whether it was good or bad, because it’s a journey. Like, ‘This is this, and the next thing will be the next thing; we’ll keep on going.’ It’s precious to me, but I’m not precious over it.” L’Humanité, however, was different: “I’d conceived it as an actual body of work.”

Bontana had grown up in a house full of music: his dad’s funk and Pat Metheny LPs, his mum’s love for bashment and Anita Baker, an older sister into drum’n’bass and an older brother swearing fealty to the Horrors and Enter Shikari. MTV introduced Bontana to Missy, Busta and OutKast, but heavy music was his first love. “People didn’t understand,” he grins. “They’d be like, ‘You listen to devil music!’”

He wrote it, too. He had got his first guitar at nine after being hospitalised with asthma, and taught himself to play. Today, alongside his hip-hop projects, he fronts “grungegaze” group Pay the Stranger and hardcore-punk outfit Spew, “the outlet for my anger, the darker side of my emotions”, he says. “One of the reasons I do it is to show Black kids it’s OK to be into this music. Seeing bands like Bad Brains, or Stout, or Suffocation,” he continues, grazing the gnarly print of his Suffocation tee with his hand, “where there were Black guys in the band … that was fuel for me.”

He started making hip-hop after moving into the apartment above the office block, making beats on his flatmate’s MacBook. US outsider rapper Lil B was, he says, “an inspiration, the first time I saw that level of freedom within an artist: ‘I’m just gonna do it and put it out.’” He started up his own record label, Everything Is Perfect, and began pumping tracks out via Bandcamp. Along the way, he developed his own style, which he has dubbed “splayed”.

“Splayed is about vulnerability and honesty, genuine moments and genuine emotions,” he explains. Early-00s alt-rap auteurs Madlib and J Dilla were “the godfathers to me, for their unrestrained thought processes”, though other inspirations hail from closer to home. “The music of Birmingham is undeniable: Black Sabbath, UB40, the Streets,” he says. “I’d love to collaborate with Mike Skinner. And Birmingham hip-hop – when I was growing up, the Oddysee were amazing. But nobody knows about them.”

The Oddysee example taught Bontana that making it happen from Birmingham would be a challenge. “Things aren’t set up like in London. There aren’t the venues. Getting people out to see you is a struggle.” But Bontana’s resolve is unshakable, even if running his operation on a shoestring while juggling a day job as assistant community manager in an apartment block is tough. “I’ve got to make this happen from Brum,” he says. “I’ve got to be the change I want to see in the world.”

New album My Name is the first he’s pressed on vinyl and sold in shops, another “intentional” release, like L’Humanité (and thus distinct from the eight or so albums and mixtapes he’s released in between). His most realised opus yet is Bontana’s treatise on identity, though it also continues to explore themes of grief, along with the genocide in Gaza (Soft Dreams, where he declares, “I could never turn a blind eye”). “I’m not saying every artist should be writing protest songs,” he says. “But if we want a world where people can live in peace, we have to speak on those things, to get to that place.”

He says he is not trying to preach. “But we have to look at what’s going on, and be aware, and have conversations. Witnessing the genocide has affected me, so I have to speak on it, the same way I have about my grief.” The catharsis in what Bontana does is crucial to him. “I’ll go to hardcore shows at the weekend, so I can be calm the rest of the week,” he grins, but then he gets serious. “I’ve seen people go through the maddest shit and not even talk about it. I’m guilty of it as well. But the more I express, the more I’m honest about what I feel, the easier life is.”

• My Name is out now on Everything Is Perfect