British actor and DJ Idris Elba has been making major music appearances at prominent music festivals such as Coachella earlier this year in addition to major club gigs in the party capital of Ibiza. This year the actor is going one step further, curating the soundtrack for his directorial debut Yardie, with The YARDIE Mixtape.

The YARDIE Mixtape is going to include contributions from many in the UK music scene including Chip, Toddla T, Cadenza, Zed Bias, along with dubstep legend Mala, who helped pioneer the genre as one half of the Digital Mystikz crew back in the mid 2000s. One of the first new tracks “King Fox,” by Newham Generals, has also been released in support of the upcoming musical project

“King Fox” is a grime track with a hard hitting boom bap beat and sound typical of the early sounds of the genre, before its explosion in the 2010s. Like the film, this track emphasizes the sounds and styles of many in the London community housing projects where many different musical styles and cultures began to blend and take form.

Based the novel of the same name by Jamaican-born writer Victor Headley, Yardie is a crime drama set 1970s- and ’80s-London revolving around the interconnected worlds of the underground Jamaican narcotics industry and the music industry that popularized dub throughout the country, and eventually gave birth to soundsystem culture and block parties throughout the UK.

Although the dub explosion in the early 80s helped sow the beginnings of grime music and British hip hop, it wasn’t until the latter half of the decade where the musical styles began to meld together. Thanks to the influence of dub, New York hip hop, electronic music and R&B, these genres helped come together as their own genre, “trip hop,” hich laid the foundations for other genres such as grime. Trip hop gained popularity in the early 90s thanks to groups such as Massive Attack, Portishead and Thievery Corporation, who saw a slew of hugely popular releases such as Blue Lines, Dummy and The Richest Man in Babylon throughout the 1990s and 2000s.

The YARDIE Mixtape

1. Cadenza – “Teapot” feat. Prynce Mini
2. Toddla T x Chip – “Yard”
3. Newham Generals – “King Fox”
4. Kouslin feat. Logan – “Weh Mi Come From”
5. Idris Elba – “Stand By Me” feat. Kranium & Tanika
6. Breakage – “Stannup”
7. Zed Bias – “Duppy” feat. King Fox
8. Mala – “Choose The Right Path”
9. Crooked Man – “Yardie Skank” feat. Farai
10. Idris Elba – “Stand By Me” feat. Kranium & Tanika (Dennis Bovell Dub)