Tony Bontana - Battered Chips (Official Video)

Picture Credit: Jago Stock

Tony Bontana serves up Battered Chips.

Birmingham rapper, producer, and multi-instrumentalist Tony Bontana serves up Battered Chips, a bass soaked, genre blurring single that encapsulates his trademark “Splayed” sound, a fusion of heavily manipulated samples, non linear rhythms, and raw, introspective lyricism.

“Battered Chips speaks on the past few years of my life, settling into a new home, juggling shows and making music alongside running the label,” explains Bontana.  “The lyric ‘Hard work, late nights, no sleep, take flights’ encapsulates what the past few months have been like.”

Released through his independent imprint Everything Is Perfect Records, Battered Chips offers an early taste of Bontana’s forthcoming album My Name, due early next year, and marks another high point in a prolific run that’s establishing him as one of the UK’s most inventive underground voices.

Bontana's already extensive discography includes emotionally charged works like L’Humanité (2024), a tribute to his late mother; the mellow, leftfield mixtape TUMPIT (2025); and The Beautiful Malaise (2025) with Psychedelic Ensemble, which fuses abstract hip hop, post hardcore, indie rock, punk and soul, showcasing his playful, genre-blind approach.

In addition to his own releases, Bontana is the sole feature on Nourished By Time's acclaimed album, The Passionate Ones, and has been endorsed by Marcus from Nourished By Time and praised by Pitchfork for having the, "freewheeling spirit of a streetballer out on the playground".  His growing production credits include work with  Lil B, billy woods, Novelist, PREM, Jadasea, Goya Gumbani and Cities Aviv, while live he's been chosen to support Mark William Lewis, Nourished By Time, YHWH Nailgun, TAGABOW, 545, Chuck Strangers and Dry Cleaning.

A proud Brummie, Bontana also DJ’s a wide ranging, unpredictable mix of music on NTS, Balamii and Kiosk Radio, alongside his weekly residency on Birmingham Sounds Radio.

Explaining his creative approach to The Wire magazine, Bontana said: “We call it Splayed.  It’s very open.  It’s like blown out, blown apart.  The samples have been chopped beyond recognition.  The rhythms aren’t necessarily straight, in terms of metre and tempo.  The processing is destructive.  We’ll start from a sample and we’re degrading it.  Taking away literally the bitrate quality of it, messing it up more to make something beautiful out of something that isn’t considered beautiful.”