Lancey Foux on ‘The Time Of Our Lives’ and legacy: “I’m signing out of everything I’ve built”

Don’t let the sweaty, pearl-blue-lit hedonism of his album cover fool you: when Lancey Foux (born Lance Omal) joins NME’s Zoom call, the 30-year-old is coming from a morning spent in regimented rigour. Already, he’s completed a full-body boxer-style workout and spent the rest of his morning sharpening his skills behind the decks, with a Cupra car event later on. It’s a typically restless schedule for an artist, DJ and budding label head whose career has rarely settled into one lane. “I get super busy, so I try to go to the gym five or six days a week,” he says. “I just try to get it in where I can.” Foux wasn’t always a 6am riser. His cutting, almost samurai-like focus has been tempered through years of learning and relentless work. Before all that, however, the rap crooner’s cult mixtape run began with the double shot of 2015’s ‘Pink’ and ‘Teen Skum’, alongside breakout track ‘About It’, before gathering momentum with ‘Too Far Alive’, ‘Pink II’ and 2019 cult favourite ‘Friend Or Foux’. “When I kicked off doing the things I was doing, there wasn’t anyone else doing it how I was,” he asserts, in reference to his style of rap in the mid-2010s rap pantheon. “I might be new to fans who...