The Streets is an English musical project led by vocalist and multi-instrumentalist Mike Skinner. The project was founded in the early 90s in Birmingham, while Skinner was still a teenager; however, no music would formally come out until the early 2000s. In the initial run of The Streets, the project released five studio albums: Original Pirate Material (2002), A Grand Don't Come for Free (2004), The Hardest Way to Make an Easy Living (2006), Everything Is Borrowed (2008) and Computers and Blues (2011). The Streets also released a string of successful singles during this time, which reached the Top 40 on the UK Singles chart – including "Has It Come to This?", "Fit but You Know It", "Dry Your Eyes" (the project's only number-one single), "When You Wasn't Famous" and "Prangin' Out". After disbanding The Streets in 2011, Skinner pursued several other musical projects before ultimately reviving the moniker in 2017. A mixtape, None of Us Are Getting Out of This Life Alive, was released in 2020. The Streets' sixth studio album, The Darker the Shadow the Brighter the Light, was released in September 2023.
The Streets is considered one of the most important and influential acts within the trajectory of hip-hop, garage and grime music within the UK. In 2020, Pitchfork described Original Pirate Material as "a landmark for UK rap", while Dazed wrote in 2018 that the album "soundtracked the beginning of a decade – recovering from the Britpop hangover and comedown from New Labour euphoria – but also defined it."
