On “father”, the syrupy lead single to Jim Legxacy’s black british music (2025), the Lewisham multi-disciplinary drops one of the most memorable lines of the year: “On the block, I was listening to Mitski.” It sums up his mantra fairly perfectly. Against the backdrop of a cold, stony London underground, he manages to find a grander sense of wistfulness in tales of generational grief, poverty and hopeless romance, woven together by exciting, quirky production that reads as the construction of a musical sphere solely reserved for him.

It would be diminishing to call black british music a rap project, an R&B project, or even a pop project. Instead, it finds itself in the creative nexus of Legxacy’s seemingly endless sea of influences, soaring above any conventional labels that could attempt to box in his sound. Equally inspired by the radio hits of British youth and the new underground movements of the day, Legxacy bridges generations, forgoing form and championing a singular stylistic elasticity. Over warped harpsichords and pumping snares on “new david bowie”, he tellingly sneers “she don’t like no rappers, so I told her I’m a singer.”

Legxacy’s prior project was the star-making 2023 mixtape HNPM, which found his passionate coos postured in front of fluid production that fused elements of afrobeats, UK drill, moody R&B and finger-plucked midwest emo riffs. black british music pushes his agenda forward by sticking to even less of a defined formula, diving further into individual pockets of genre and exploring their full potentials within the context of his sonic orbit. “06 wayne rooney” is a throttling dance-punk rager a la early Bloc Party, while singles “father” and “stick” flip vintage soul samples into the familiar rhythms of jerk rap, striking mixtape-era gold with nimbly melodic flows and interjections from omnipresent DJs.

Two emotional cores underscore the mixtape, which doesn’t shy away from somber territory: the passing of Legxacy’s younger sister in 2023, and the portion of time that he spent homeless prior to a now-stable music career. He sniffles through chamber-folk ballad “issues of trust”, processing the aftermath of loss and fighting the urge to succumb to numbness. Perhaps the project’s heart lies in misleadingly-titled “i just banged a snus in canada water”, his most visceral rap performance to date and a rallying cry for dismantling generational traumas. “I can’t let them do me how they did me as a kid,” he vigorously repeats on the chorus. “How I go from poverty to pop star?”

If anything, the tape loses steam when it begins to fill familiar molds, straying away from the hodgepodge pallets that define Legxacy’s best work. Tracks like “sun” with Fimiguerrero and “sos” are more akin to BBC Radio 1-branded summery, mellow afrobeats — which is to say that they’re enjoyable, but that they don’t necessarily sound like Jim Legxacy songs. The Dave-assisted “3x” will likely be his biggest look to date, but it ends up compromising a good deal of his patch-woven creativity to meet the featured chart-topper in the middle for something more agreeable.

As the scope of Jim Legxacy’s sound expands, the more blindingly clear it becomes that he’s going to serve as a creative trailblazer for years to come. black british music finds him at somewhat of a fascinating crossroads, toeing the line between several directions that his career could shoot off into — some more daringly creative, others following a more narrowly defined lineage. For now, his earnest tribulations are still invigoratingly unconventional, with more than enough room for stylistic pump-fakes, soul-bearing confessionals, and thankfully, humble musings on “selling Charli to the brats.”

Order Black British Music (2025) by Jim Legxacy HERE