Jim Legxacy doesn’t sound like anyone else, or, rather, he sounds like everything all at once. On his breakthrough release, 2023’s homeless n***a pop music, he mined Midwest emo, Afrobeats, drill, and grime to concoct something idiosyncratic out of well-established subgenres. He’s a bona fide multi-hyphenate, to use one of the most trite buzzwords in music criticism. But in his case, there’s truth to it: His stylistic agnosticism results in the birth of something truly exciting and novel. All of this is reaffirmed on the long-teased black british music (2025), another highlight reel of the Londoner’s wide-ranging tastes and talents. He once again proves his mettle as a shapeshifter and as a fount of ideas that come and go in a flash but are always fully formed.
This variegated ethos is one of the central components of his appeal. It’s best exemplified by his stark shifts in tone that underline his ability to interpret countless styles through his own point of view. There are yearning, heartfelt vocals over American Football guitar noodling one moment on “‘sos” and Central Cee flex raps a moment later on “i just banged a snus in canada water.” Much like its predecessor, Legxacy’s fourth mixtape grants him the wherewithal to exercise his interdisciplinary songwriting, a home in which genres both coexist and transcend one another. Across its 15 tracks, black british music pays homage to musical histories without collapsing them into a monolith or diluting them into a pastiche. Instead, Legxacy uses his reference points as an avenue for originality.
Take a song like “father,” which samples George Smallwood’s “I Love My Father” to explore Legxacy’s sense of paternal abandonment, flipping a song about unconditional love for a flawed figure into his own tale about absentee dads: “Making money off a phone I was 16 / Had no dad, but I never was a miskeen,” he sings. On “stick,” he questions why no one else can operate at his caliber, prodding artists who pass others’ styles off as their own creations, a snippet of grime star Skepta’s “Going Through It” burbling low in the mix. It’s an especially pointed barb, considering his aptitude for translating rather than outright imitating his influences: “Them n***as bite swag and then they wonder why they couldn’t stick,” he delivers in a half-rapped, half-sung cadence.
Braggadocio abounds throughout, but black british music mostly concerns itself with tales of economic strife, upward mobility, houselessness, romantic yearning, and familial melancholy. “issues of trust” finds Legxacy in ballad mode with orchestral string flourishes, finger-picked acoustic guitars, and introspective lyrics about his strained relationship with his father: “I still can’t talk about it,” he admits in his swooning timbre. Meanwhile, the emo-tinged dembow bop “sos” wrestles with the difficulty of watching the one you love chase after someone else. “He won’t take you out / I know you’ve asked a thousand times,” he sings, his emotive voice perched evenly between desperation and determination. At the same time, these new songs demonstrate Legxacy’s refusal to repeat himself. While black british music largely adheres to the Afrobeats-emo fusion he cemented on hnpm, he adapts that blend in fresh ways, whether it’s through acoustic balladry (“issues of trust”), lush alt-pop (“‘06 wayne rooney”), or anthemic Britpop (“dexters phone call”).
It also helps that Legxacy understands the power of brevity; most songs hover around the two-minute mark, and the whole project blazes by in less than 35 minutes. Coupled with the sheer amount of ideas he manages to pack into a single track, black british music encourages endless re-listens with plenty of minute details you maybe didn’t notice on the previous go-around. There’s the gliding, cushiony synth bass on “d.b.a.b”; the pitch-shifted vocal samples in the background of “big time forward”; the soft, fuzzy coating of the guitars on the dexter in the newsagent-featuring “dexters phone call.” There’s a lot to take in, but never is it overwhelming. It ensures a longevity that makes the replay button all the more enticing.
Despite the downtrodden subject matter of many of its songs, black british music sounds jubilant, its creator digging through his lived past and music as a whole to realize his own artistry. Like any large city, London can be a harsh place, especially to those without housing. But Jim Legxacy is actively building his own version of London and Britain as a whole, a site of rich musical lineage that he’s contributing to and re-defining in tandem. “Black British music, we’ve been making asses shake since the Windrush,” the mixtape’s host announces at the top of “father,” referring to the name of a 1948 ship that brought roughly 500 passengers from the Caribbean to the UK so they could rebuild Britain’s post-WWII economy. With Jim at the vanguard, he’s crafting a new canon, one that takes an omnivorous approach to genre in a way that’s deft yet earnest, arty yet catchy, intricate yet immediate. Call it his legxacy.
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.
