Nikolaos Kitsos, one of the defining voices of Greek hip-hop, brings the Minos EMI catalogue to Camden's Electric Ballroom for one Sunday night in December.
Nikolaos Kitsos was born in Xanthi, in Greek Thrace, in 1995, formed a rap group with school friends at sixteen and started putting videos online in 2013. As Bloody Hawk he made four albums, Komplexiko, 1 Evro, Timima and Fthina Tricks, that between them defined what Greek hip-hop sounds like now: heavy, unhurried, delivered in a low register with almost no melody, and written about a country most Greek pop does not describe. Minos EMI signed him in 2021, by which point the independent releases had already done the work.
The scale is easy to underestimate from Britain. The singles run to tens of millions of plays in a country of ten million people, and he is one of the few Greek artists of his generation whose audience is domestic first and diaspora second. He is twenty-nine and has been releasing music for more than half his life.
He takes the Electric Ballroom in Camden on Sunday 13 December 2026, standing, with an over-14 door. It is the only kind of room this music has ever been played in here — no seats, no tables, none of the apparatus a laiko night comes with — and it is a long way from the seated halls most of this calendar’s touring acts play. Doors at seven, and a Sunday, which tells you who is expected to travel for it.