It’s early November and London’s Electric Ballroom is heaving. The warm-up DJ drops Fetty Wap’s 2014 smash Trap Queen, and the young crowd, a fair portion of whom were in primary school when the tune first came out, roar every word. They’re clad in baggy skatewear, with distressed, monochromatic union jacks plastered across hats and jackets. A coat sails across the room: someone is going home chilly tonight, but that’ll be the last thing on their mind as Liverpool rapper EsDeeKid, one of the fastest-rising musicians in the world, explodes on to the stage.

Wrapped in a hooded cloak and spinning like a twig in a hurricane, he grabs the mic and snarls: “Are you ready for rebellion?”, his distinctive scouse accent battling a storm of apocalyptic bass and John Carpenter-esque horror synths. Behind him, projections flash in stark black and red – tower blocks, eyeballs, dot-matrix geometries – more like the ragged photocopy aesthetic of 80s post-punk than any luxury rap branding. The teenagers in the room are ecstatic, borne aloft by the palpable sense, thrumming from stage to pit, that this is A Moment.

They are right. Two weeks after the show, EsDeeKid’s breakthrough single Phantom, one minute and 50 seconds of gothic inner-city pressure, crashes into the UK Top 20. Despite having only started to release music in 2024, the masked, anonymous rapper has more than 10m monthly Spotify listeners. By the end of November, his debut album, Rebel, was Spotify’s most streamed hip-hop album in the world; his latest single, Century, reached the UK Top 10. As he maintains silence in the press, wild conspiracy theories have circulated, including one suggesting he was the US actor Timothée Chalamet moonlighting as a self-proclaimed “council house rat” from Liverpool. EsDeeKid has neither confirmed it, nor denied.

To the outside world his rise seemed to happen overnight. But EsDeeKid is part of a new movement that has been gradually emerging – with a recent rush in momentum – from all corners of the UK. After grime shifted to road rap in the mid-00s, and the rise of UK drill and Afroswing in the mid-2010s, this is the latest evolution of homegrown rap culture. And while UK rappers such as Dave, Stormzy and Central Cee still sell out arenas, and Aitch charms the masses on I’m a Celebrity, these new artists are starting to rival them for popularity while having considerably more edge.

The kids at Electric Ballroom are friendly and eager to talk, and they all call the new sound “underground” rap. I chat with Billy, one of three lads who have come down from Birmingham, and he reels off a list of artists who are pushing the scene forward: “Lancey Foux, Fimiguerrero, Len, EsDeeKid, Rico Ace, Fakemink, Jim Legxacy. Underground is exciting – it keeps getting more and more experimental.”

Pinning down the underground sound is tricky. Upcoming rapper Ceebo describes it as capturing the zeitgeist: “Constant stimulation – dopamine overload.” Fizzing, lo-fi tracks come and go in under two minutes, with everything cranked into the red. Crucially, Britishness is in the foreground, with older UK tracks used for samples, regional accents flourishing, and lyrics as likely to concern getting messy in small market towns as they are to imitate US gangster rap.

Pushing the scene forward … Fakemink. Photograph: PR IMAGE

The scene has spread through TikTok, Discord groups, Instagram and, most importantly, live shows of increasing size, something police forces often made impossible for earlier generations of drill and grime artists. (Many would argue the reason the underground scene hasn’t been similarly policed is because there is a higher proportion of white and/or middle class kids involved, both as artists and punters.) Promoters such as Aux (who also runs EsDeeKid’s label) have become serious players in the live space, packing out regular showcases with hordes of young fans who, numbed by the overwhelming flood of social media, crave the chaotic, tangible joy of mosh pits and massive speakers.

Now, with US rap in the doldrums – in October there were no rap songs on the US Hot 100 for the first time since 1990 – fans across the Atlantic are starting to pay attention to this maxed-out music. We may be witnessing the start of a new British Invasion: another star of the UK underground, Fakemink, was pictured hanging with Clipse and Andre 3000 in Los Angeles in November, and played Tyler, the Creator’s festival there. “I’m a huge advocate of what’s going on in the underground,” says Kenny Allstar, the BBC’s chief rap DJ and arguably the foremost authority on British rap. “The next generation are here.”

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While the scene’s biggest shows have taken place in London, the sound has spread rapidly across the country, drawing in kids from suburban towns in much the same way as punk did in the 1970s. Ledbyher, one of the few rising female artists in the scene, grew up in a council house in Norfolk, and listened to US rap until she was introduced to UK drill by a school friend and learned you could rap convincingly in an English accent.

“Where drill might have been a very niche aspect of London life, the underground is commenting on a life that more of us find ourselves in,” she says, while on tour around the UK. “The underground now, its lyrics relate to people growing up in High Wycombe or wherever – it’s a commentary on British life.” Originally coining the phrase “bedroom drill” for her sound, her tracks deal with relationships, dreams and depression – “Step into my wreck of a ship / I don’t even know whose wreckage it is,” she raps on her Bad News freestyle, a hazy, rainy cut that nods as much to trip-hop as trap.

“The producers might be from Scotland, Ireland; you have people from Canterbury,” she says, and points out that YT, another of the scene’s leading lights, attended an institution not generally known as an engine room for British rap: the University of Oxford. “There’s not one place the scene is from.”

But everyone acknowledges one artist who has been fundamental to its growth. “Lancey Foux is a trailblazer,” says Allstar. “He started in 2015, and couldn’t be boxed in: not drill, or Afroswing, or trap. He was more outlandish with his approach to the music, using heavy melodic vibes with distorted beats. It created a new wave.”

He points to Foux’s skittering, chiming 2015 track About It. “It was like nothing we’d seen before. At that stage it didn’t have its own genre – you just knew which artists fitted the sound as they didn’t fit into any other mould. But if you went up to these artists and said, ‘Are you underground?’ they’d probably say no.”

Punk aesthetic … Lancey Foux. Photograph: Elissa Salas

Raised in Stratford, London by Ugandan parents, Foux, who turned 30 this week, agrees. He has consistently worked with the kind of woozy Day-Glo rap beats used by US megastars such as Playboi Carti and Travis Scott, with injections of UK slang, rhythms and bass, making a druggy-sounding, nocturnal music at odds with much of UK rap’s social realism. In 2024 he started collaborating with a raft of new talent, on singles such as the 15m-streaming Black & Tan with YT, and the Conglomerate mixtape with Fimiguerrero and Len, which reached the UK Top 30. These projects signalled a shift away from the nihilism of drill to a weirder space, but as with most trailblazers, Foux is not keen on being boxed in by genre.

“The term ‘underground’, it’s very restrictive!” Foux calls me, he says from LA, where he’s shooting videos for his forthcoming album. “EsDeeKid is one of the biggest UK artists, so why would you call him underground? This shit is big! YT, Fimi and EsDeeKid have bigger songs than other rappers in the UK. Not to say underground is a bad word – but this is our opportunity to name our sound, and I’m calling it the overground.”

Spirit of defiance … Jim Legxacy. Photograph: Igoris Tarran

Crucially, as with mod, punk or Britpop, the scene top-loads on Britishness. The songs are full of British samples – everything from Bizarre Inc’s rave classic Playing with Knives on the track Ayia Napa by west Londoner Feng, to flashes of decades-old Dizzee Rascal vocals on the latest Ceebo record. Jim Legxacy’s latest mixtape is titled Black British Music (2025), and Afrosurrealist’s debut album is called Buy British. In a spirit of defiance against the far-right appropriation of the union jack, artists have been plastering British flags all over their artwork. “I think I would die if I had to leave this country,” rapper Llondon Actress croons on his biggest hit Country, its artwork fringed with more union jacks.

Director Lauzza has a YouTube channel featuring music videos he has made for scene leaders Jim Legxacy, YT, Foux and others. He explains that the scene is trying to take control of the meaning of Britishness.

“A lot of young people are not the most patriotic,” he says. “They’re not proud of the economic mess of a country that they’re living in. So to be able to reinvent the union jack to mean something new, creating our own Britain and our own culture that we can be proud of, that feels right.” But none of the rappers are using England’s St George’s flag. “English is more ethnicity, whereas British is more of a culture,” Lauzza says. “That’s why Jim [Legxacy] is able to use the flag and talk about being British – he’s representing something.”

This played out in the recent video Lauzza and Jim made for the track ‘06 Wayne Rooney. Responding to Legxacy’s attempt to create a nostalgic indie-rock track ready for Match of the Day, Lauzza recreated the aesthetics of a mid-00s Fifa video game, complete with Jim in a pixelated Manchester United kit. It was a heady rush of UK nostalgia, and for the 24-year-old Lauzza, a response to the country’s current misery.

“The news is just negative, negative, negative: it can be very draining for the average young person,” he says. “We’re all just reaching for the last time we remember being truly happy, when you could come home from school and slap on Fifa and nothing else mattered. These artists are the same age as a lot of these fans – and their music is about a lot of similar struggles.”

Not everyone is as comfortable with the use of flag iconography. Ceebo has just released Blair Babies, his third mixtape in as many years, featuring three tracks produced by the ever-influential Legxacy. On tracks such as Jook, Ceebo grapples with growing up skint in Brixton over a beat that has a soft, magical glow, creating a curious tension between the sweetness of nostalgia and the reality of inner-city life. And as the title Blair Babies suggests, he is exploring Britain’s recent past with a critical eye.

“I have a lot of conversations about Britishness,” he says. “A lot of us are children of immigrants. We’re not considered British, but we’re not exactly natives of our parents’ countries. So the idea of being Black British has become more visible in our generation’s minds; the exploration of ‘British’ as a term for children of countries that have been ravaged by British colonialism is the scene’s way of wrestling with an identity that hasn’t really been laid out for them.”

Ceebo is ambivalent about the prevalence of the flag in the scene. “A lot of artists want to have their cake and eat it,” he says with a sigh. “But they’re not smart enough to walk the line between reclaiming something and just appropriating it. It’s essentially a symbol of violence.”

Walking the line … Ceebo. Photograph: Patrick Sear

He reflects on the fact that his music is now being listened to by white suburban kids around the country. “Whether or not people from the underground realise it, we are shaping the youth of this country’s thoughts and feelings towards Black Britishness. We have to approach it as a dialogue with the people who are consuming it, and this matters a lot more than hype moments.”

But as that hype snowballs, and more and more rappers jump on the kind of distorted rap beats Lancey Foux popularised, on his new record Foux himself is taking a left turn into dance music. His argument for doing so sums up the spirit that has inspired this generation. “Whenever they start loving you too much for how you look and how you sound and how you dress, shake it off. Don’t get too comfortable in satisfaction. Do something new. It’s not as narrow as a style of rap or a style of music; it’s down to the alternative-ness of what you’re delivering.” At the beginning, he says, “No one, including myself, cared about being big – it was more punk.”

This punk aesthetic is most visible now in the way the new generation have embraced live shows. As mainstream acts chase digital streaming and online connections, Foux has built a fanbase through an almost anachronistic route in the streaming age: the hard graft of constant touring.

“The music that we make is live music,” he says. “Everyone in this space, your biggest flex is hitting the stage. Streams and all these things other rappers worry about have only become relevant recently. The real crown on the head is knowing you’ve dropped a song that is going to go crazy live. That’s how you get your rank.”

I mention the sold-out EsDeeKid show to him, and he’s not surprised. “I know EsDeeKid wants to be a big touring artist – I can see it and feel it. Him, Fimi, YT, whoever: it’s a big shift happening, it’s great. We’re making superstars.”

Century by EsDeeKid is out now on XV Records/Lizzy Records. Daytona by Lancey Foux is out now on RCA Records. What’s the Reason? by Ledbyher is out now on Island Records. Blair Babies by Ceebo is out now on Liberation Records.