The UK Underground is Built to Last

When underground shows start being held in 1,500 cap venues in Camden Town, it’s usually a sign that whatever they’re doing is no longer underground. Such is the case with Draft Day 2, a frenetic annual showcase of rising artists from the UK and Ireland. Put on by Aux London (the promoters who bought Nettspend, Xaviersobased, and Osamason to the UK for the first time), last year’s Draft Day platformed the likes of Rico Ace, Sinn6r, and EsDeeKid, the first Liverpudlian since those other famous scousers to truly seize the world’s attention.

But with recent waves of commercial success, global exposure, and industry dollars beckoning for the UK underground—colloquially referred to as the “UK Ug”—Draft Day 2 finds the scene in a considerably different place. The UK Ug’s previous wave of artists are now in bigger conversations, to both positive and negative effect. fakemink linked up with Drake at Wireless Festival, Feng’s hosting 2010s Melrose hipster LA house parties, and EsDeeKid reportedly inked an eight-figure deal with Capitol Records—rumoured to be among the biggest in UK rap history.

With “underground” now a stand-in for a distinctive arm of popular UK music, a slew of exciting upstarts are making music in the buffer zone between all-out success and niche community. There are artists advocating for gender parity in the underground, mixtapes dissecting the harmful psychosocial effects of the 1997-2007 New Labour government, and even a few rappers in dialogue with the French. Draft Day 2, Aux’s free-to-attend, eighteen-artist-strong homecoming, is attempting to capture the zeitgeist of this explosive moment in UK music.

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My journey down to Draft Day 2 is as hectic as the line that meets me at the front of Electric Ballroom, a storied venue in an uber-touristy part of London. I make my way past a gaggle of Spanish kids on a school trip, before joining them in marvelling at the motley queue of scene kids in front of me.

At the front, there are hardcore mosh-heads, guys in Union Jack ballies, tall kids in leather pants, and youths in jackets with more spikes than an iron maiden. Elsewhere, there’s the occasional young-Prince-William-haired white kid with a Chief Keef polo on who has made their journey out of the suburbs and will definitely be leaving early to catch the last train back to Surrey. On the curb, girls in pink skirts and chunky boots sit on the pavement, clutching colored vapes that match their outfits.

I’m waiting to meet with Taireque, who manages kwes e, one of tonight’s performers. A Ghanaian-British twentysomething who mods jerk, RnB, afrobeats, and rap, kwes e has been part of this scene since its inception. His latest tape, fingers crossed, stands out for its execution of this style: g-funk synths flow like cold Moët; jerk rhythms render nearly everything as danceable; and there’s even a quasi-operatic duet with Irish rapper deathtoricky. Most importantly, the tape is packed with different motifs that explore kwes e’s experience of Britain—moving between the art kids he came up with, his love for London, and his Ghanaian identity. It also feels indicative of the experience of growing up in England’s suburbs and small cities.

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We meet after kwes e’s soundcheck, before bundling upstairs into a quiet green room on the top floor. “kwes e is someone who was born in Ghana and moved to a place where he was showered in city lights,” the artist tells me, beginning to sit up. “I was a victim to the city. The city lights of London really drew me in and hypnotised me.”

Often, subcultures and suburbia don’t go hand in hand, but kwes e’s experience is different, reflecting the growing number of artists exploring British identity outside of the cities. PinkPantheress, for example, grew up with him in Canterbury, as did the scene’s go-to video director, LAUZZA. “I don’t know what happened in Canterbury during my school year, but there was an entire group of us that found a love for the arts,” kwes e says. “When we hit 17, we all realised, ‘Oh, wait, you like this and you do this, and you're making this after school.’ My house became the place where everyone came round.”

This communal ethos is something kwes e carries with him to this day. He says staying true to community can counteract the music industry pigeonholing the scene or killing it. “I think when you think of it as a scene,” he pauses, “your connections can be fickle and thin. We’re all brothers and sisters before music.”

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Like kwes e, it’s no surprise to note that a growing number of Draft Day’s artists are not actually from London, despite the city’s association with UK rap. I chat with Slew, whose catarrh-ing drawl is the byproduct of a childhood spent between West London and Hertfordshire. S5, another one of tonight’s performers, is from Nottingham, a city in the East Midlands; rage-rapper Goosey hails from the northern city of Sheffield, where “come up” sounds like “com opp,” and deathtoricky is from the same town in Ireland where Guinness was invented.

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Slew. Photo by @kult.jpg

Goosey. Photo by @kult.jpg

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I get back from the interview at the end of the soundchecks and spend time wandering around the venue’s weird backrooms as everyone preps for the show. In one, a videographer sits on a sofa, locked in, with two laptops on the go. In the smoking area, EsDeeKid’s stylist brings Aux Lua, Aux London’s founder, a glitzy custom chain. Upstairs, a heavily masked up Sinn6r, tonight’s special guest, daps me up and grabs a bottle of champagne.

Although the scene’s stylistic remit has grown in recent years, it’s clear that the crowd wants baleful rage. Like any underground showcase, the sets are a short 10 to 15 minutes. Moshpits open up like sinkholes and peals of 808s engulf the senses. This is a crowd surrendered to sound and also a crowd of kids simply on a night out: a maximalist, warped reimagination of the days British kids used to go out to youth clubs, dancehalls, and school discos. It’s a competition of who can wear the most audacious fits, who’s got the best mosh-pit histrionics, and who can endure three hours of heavy cardio without passing out.

Some more nascent artists are also getting their come up tonight, like S5 and Goosey, but also Juveniall, a rapper who I kept hearing about from fans in the line. Now the prince of UK rage, Sinn6r’s surprise set also goes off. He comes out to “Vardy,” a tune from the deluxe version of his #FEDERAL album. “Two Aux boys just walked in the party,” he says, shouting out the promoters in between sips of the champagne he grabbed earlier. Ketamised synth shards and heavy trap drums coat the room, with kids spilling over into the press’ allocated standing spot. When the fury ends, a sweaty kid on the verge of collapse goes down to do his laces, and a security guard ushers him out, telling him to pull his pants up.

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Anjeli, the singer who follows his set, has a completely different vibe in the best way. Her hair is done up in a short ginger bob—an aesthetic that feels like a mix between UK Ug style and that of the old school pop singers who inspire her. In this way, Anjeli’s music pulls from a range of influences—Pink Panthress, Timi Yuro, Snoh Aalegra, Brenda Lee—but is marked by its focus on soft, Mirinda-sweet melodies, which glide over liquid drum‘n’bass and ethereal chords. At the side of the stage, her sister, underground songstress Ledbyher, watches on proudly, before going bar for bar to an Anjeli song with N4T, another key player in the scene.

Anjeli, like kwes e, is another artist who cites her sense of place and upbringing as an influence, although she doesn’t share the same sense of community as kwes e, nor his proximity to London. It was Kings Lynn, a town in the rural county of Norfolk where her family settled after moving between Germany and Indonesia, that led her to start making music. It's characterized by a stark class divide, dull monoculture, and rural mindset. As such, Anjeli and her sister’s upbringing was marked by “rage and confusion,” for which music was an outlet.

“It’s a hard place to survive as a creative person,” she says. “But [our family] also used to get a lot of scrutiny. People didn't want to speak to us because my dad is Scottish and 6ft, my mum's a 4ft Southeast Asian woman. People would kind of look at us and be, like, ‘What the fuck is this?’ ‘What do we do with this?’”

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While Draft Day puts on some of the underground’s most exciting upstarts, the lineups have been overwhelmingly male, despite the scene’s audience having a significant number of women. Two out of eighteen artists at Aux’s event were women, which led to pushback within the community.

“I know the audience wasn’t there for us, for the ladies,” Anjeli says. “But [the ratio of men to women on stage], especially when you’ve got so many female artists in the scene, feels crazy,” she tells me, citing some of the scene’s best female artists like Luchï, vvsmygwen, and Sade Olutola. “I'm not saying Aux didn't shout them, 'cause who knows, behind the scenes they might have, and people couldn’t make it, which is fair,” she says. But, citing an incident at the show where fellow female artist Mayvi was booed off stage by a section of the audience, she says this disparity in booking is having a “problematic” effect on female artists and fans alike, especially in spaces that do not always feel safe for those artists and fans.

“If there were more women on the lineups, then more women would turn up. Women would feel more comfortable to pop out and have their fun…People being able to see [diversity] and being encouraged to explore their identities,” Anjeli says, “will help us break down boundaries of not only what it means to be British, but what it means to be a British musician.”

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Another one of tonight’s performers, Ceebo, has this idea of interrogating British identity at the forefront of his music. With production credits from afrosurrealist and Jim Legxacy, his latest tape, Blair Babies, is a vivid portrait of Ceebo’s lived experience and the struggles of a generation born from 1997-2007, who experienced the harmful socioeconomic effects of the UK’s New Labour government, were old enough to remember neoliberal optimism, but could not benefit from it.

Ceebo grew up in Brixton Hill, South London, and he cites the area’s range of ethnicities as a key influence. As a kid, his listening was split between popular noughties rap, Congolese gospel music, ‘80s ballads heard in the car, and contemporary UK music. After starting at the University of Warwick, where he studied Politics and Sociology, Ceebo released his first song, followed by a string of albums that culminated in 2024’s LAMBETHNOTLA, a nimble, Kendrick Lamar-ish appraisal of his hometown that was executed with quiet auteurship.

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Ceebo’s voice is also important for its distinctly political spin. He occasionally writes a Substack and is vocal about what he sees as harmful patterns of consumption in relation to underground music. When I ask if he sees an EsDeeKid, Feng, or fakemink’s rise to fame as indicative of hyper-consumption, and if he and his peers are attempting to call that into question, he focuses on the bigger picture. “[Fans and haters] can be quick to turn it into an us versus them kind of thing, which I think is kind of reductive because I don’t really see the artists as the problem.”

Ceebo does think there’s merit in looking at the successes of UK Ug’s new school in comparison with other movements in British music. “Before it was underground in the UK, it was drill. Before it was drill, it was road rap, and before that grime, and so on and so forth. [But when you look at UK Ug success] in juxtaposition with the originators of the underground, artists like House of Pharaohs, A2, Lancey, there was no outside infrastructure [for these artists]. Now, underground music in and of itself is a multimillion pound business.”

“I think the artists are observing this [influence]…and are being a lot more cognizant about the role their music has to play in shaping Black British identity. There’s people that are turning to their origins as far as where their parents came from, and weaving that into their music. There's people who are being more overt, more forthright in what they're saying, lyrically, insofar as their influences, their background, the idea of Black Britishness, and actually wrestling with it.”

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We’re all brothers and sisters before music.

— kwes e

Artists like Jim Legxacy (who dubs his movement BBM—Black British Music), N4T, ChefBkay, TrGoBrazy, and vvsmygwen, have all made music that sits firmly outside the mainstream UK Ug sound. vvsmygwen, for example, went to Nigeria to film her music videos, and even collaborated with Ibadan artist Luwa.mp4 on a heater called “HM.” Likewise, South London artist N4T, just put out GHANAMUSTGO, a severely underrated album that deftly juggles afrobeats, underground rap, dancehall, and jerk. “It’s always a good thing when people are considering the weight of their music outside whether people will like it or not,” Ceebo says.

As the show progressed, artists from the scene’s inception kept cropping up. YT appeared at the side stage, to which a gaggle of kids reacted with hysterical jubilation; Ledbyher was there in support of her sister; even Knucks was lingering around. It was as if these artists, some of whom are still tipped as scene leaders, were taking a step back and letting something that felt grassroots and communal take place. It was TrGoBrazy’s ending set that felt like the night’s most resonant moment.

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With as many performers as possible bundled on stage, the night’s culmination felt like a collective of friends more than anything else—an even more incongruous scene set against the size of the venue, all the A&Rs watching from the balcony, and the potentially career-shaping role of the show. Regardless of where the hype cycle moves next, or if the internet deems UK Ug dead at some point, these artists speak to something more profound than online chatter: identity, a new conception of Britishness, infrastructure based on community, and a move away from a London-centric idea of UK music.

With internet culture in hyperdrive, moments like these often end before they ever really get going. You could even apply the logic that by mapping what is cool, making a scene accessible, and legitimising it in real venues with major labels, you kill it. For some parts of the underground, that might be the case. But in the UK, there’s still a vanguard who are creating unifying and radically important underground music.

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