Jim Legxacy's 'Black British Music (2025)' Is Album of the Year: Let's Talk About It
How our generation's production wiz blends brainrot, Blackness and Britishness to create a landmark sound.
Artwork for Black British Music (2025). Image property of XL Recordings.
As Black British youth across the country prod at, unpack and re-determine their identity, this year, singer, rapper and producer Jim Legxacy succeeded at providing an eclectic and emotive collage of our contemporary reality.
Nowhere is this more evident than in his signature production. Through glitchy and playfully anachronistic distortions of sound—see the blip from Wiley's "Morgue" fluttering beneath the soft-indie guitar of "3x"—he portrays a manic world whose disparate elements are incapable of fitting together.
For many, the amalgamation of Blackness and Britishness is just like this. Jim's sonic palette includes brief and broken synth lead melodies, which never seem to find resolution. His mixtape (widely mistaken for the scope of an album) embodies this ontological insecurity of an identity in stasis—never quite Black, never quite British—but instead grappling constantly between the two.
In Jeffrey Boakye's book Black, Listed, this contradiction is emphasised within a rigorous history of Black dejection in Britain. Tastefully, the project's artwork for Black British Music (2025) alludes to this very book with its red spray-painted typography atop black-and-white photography.
Interpolating J Hus on Afroswing-forward track "Sun" featuring Fimiguerrero injects euphoric bursts of nostalgia. This moment on the project runs counter to the idea that we should reject the Black British mantle and inspires joyful memories of our youth's cultural contributions to the country's heritage, joy and identity. As the host exclaims on the intro of the standout earworm, "Father": "We've been making arses shake since the Windrush".
While it felt like the UK had encountered a cultural void following the heyday of Afroswing, drill and UK hip-hop, recent successes of acts like Jim as well as YT, Len, Fakemink and more have proved that they are the descendents from the veterans who established the sounds of our childhoods.
The sceptical comments on Twitter that were aimed at the UK underground during their appearances at Wireless this year prove that there is still a long way to go before the British public accepts this succession. However, co-signs from Dave, Skepta and Headie One hint that this is the new vanguard.
Jim's approach to addressing this discussion is intriguing. It builds upon the style of his 2023 release, Homeless Nigga Pop Music, which read like a palimpsest commemorating a South London upbringing filled with both imaginative awe and anxiety. While Black British Music expands its focus to a much broader terrain, it offers a less direct portrayal of its subject. It allows its production to reflect his world, while he wanders on lyrical escapades about hedonism, grief and self-betterment.
Given the amount of attention he devotes to representing Black British culture through this LP's production, rollout and art, this may be confusing. However, the opener "Context" elucidates this choice. Jim explains that this album is about escapism, losing sight of oneself and rebuilding after the tribulations he encountered while making it. The Black British soundscape is a vector for Jim's personal expression: the fractures and attempts of self-determination from Black Britain mirroring his own personal conflicts.
This joyful communication also heavily mirrors brainrot humour—a style of internet comedy characterised by reducing joy or misery into a blur of whimsical reproductions and distorted representations of contemporary culture. This sense of humour is embedded in BBM's production through the use of cultural references to the effect of satire, irony and a distinct tongue-in-cheek quality. Black British Music in particular abstracts and disrupts our perception of Black Britain, addressing it insightfully, in jest but with creativity.
This distinct style of chaotic collages, random noises and distorted presentations can be traced back to the 1930s Dadaism movement. A reaction to the horrifying aftermath of the First World War, the Dadaism movement found artists creating works that had no explicit meaning or purpose—a nihilistic response to the failure of human ideology to make the world a better place.
The prevalence of a Black British Music summer in 2025 then—the season in which this tape stimulated the imagination of Britain's creative youth and invigorated the sounds of their leisure—was a bittersweet period of reckoning. Through dance and play, this project made its listeners rethink their position in the world, confront their beliefs and repackage them.
It's reminiscent in some ways of Charli xcx's brat, whose discombobulating, raucous and playful production connoted limitless self-indulgence. The party goes on and on and on… with very little prescience for hangovers and come downs. Dadaism—while much more sober—similarly rejects the solemn tone of philosophy and intellectualism because humanity has gotten to where it is—a permanent state of warfare, inequality and dejection—in spite of aeons of supposed enlightened thinking.
Jim comes across equally as disassociated with the tribulations of the human experience, but he exercises more restraint in his nihilism. And rightly so. The weight of the previously acknowledged racial themes demands cultural sensitivity: Black music that bears the mantle of its people as boldly as this one does requires a tactful awareness.
Additionally, the singer-songwriter's internal battles with grief, trauma and poverty push him to search for meaning as a way to escape those ills. And so, Black British Music represents a prudent engagement with style: it carefully uses Dadaist caricature and collage to deconstruct masculinity, race and identity while acknowledging the fact that these elements exist within the tectonic turbulence of postmodernity.
This is why Jim can retell (alleged) stories of sitting in the trap on "New David Bowie"—evoking the hypermasculine imagery attached to this setting—while making himself sound tender, vulnerable and hysterical on tracks like "Issues of Trust".
The world's creative youth constantly repackage themselves to be their best selves for work, for social media, for their families, for strangers. They are conscious of the fact that they are constantly being watched and produce multiple versions of themselves to satisfy the complex gaze they perform to. In the end, they are never just singular identities but an accumulation of many.
“This is why Jim can retell (alleged) stories of sitting in the trap on “New David Bowie”—evoking the hypermasculine imagery attached to this setting—while making himself sound tender, vulnerable and hysterical on tracks like “Issues of Trust”. ”
This is inevitable in postmodernity, through which culture reproduces everything around it so excessively that we lose sight of objective truth. Kodwo Eshun, radical theorist and cultural commentator, commented specifically that Black music in the West is a prime site for this: it innovates with a fierce acceleration that seems prepared for human obsolescence. This becomes intriguing when you consider that popular music is a commodity just as much as it is art.
In effect, the musician's authenticity is strapped to the free market, which is another vehicle of acceleration. Jim Legxacy's art is thus directed by the force of capitalism, which dictates what humans are and what they can be by making them adhere to market demands and desires. It's a coercive force, which disrupts (as it changes the expression of artists from something pure into something profitable), but it is also protective (since commodification places fixed labels on things and crystallises their essence).
Jim's work cements current cultural behaviours and recent histories into popular attention rather than letting them be washed away by the precarity of postmodernity. This is important because the complex humanity and universal senselessness that Jim reflects through this album can easily cause our current world to become just another frequency in the regressive echolalia of the future.
Jim Legxacy in 2025. Image property of Patrick Sear.
The present is then hardened into something concrete and identifiable rather than indefinite and ever-changing. It does, in effect, feel like he's established a sound for the 2020s—something which has been lacking in popular music across the West.
One could rightly argue that popular music's position within a capitalist landscape makes this act of preservation a fleeting one that moves culture from the safety of citizens' everyday life into the wilderness of the free market. But Jim has crystallised a time in freewheeling flux. The youth who revere him so passionately can feel that turbulence.
For a brief moment, then, this album offers them the semblance of security, the likeness of hope and the sensation of wholeness. Bearing the Black British title boldly as he does, Jim establishes a new original which has constructed its own past to pull from, its own gazes to perform to, as well as its own values. In a senseless world that regresses endlessly, Black British Music represents something new.
Stream Black British Music (2025) below: