Jim Legxacy’s black british music (2025) Is a Highlight Reel of Its Maker’s Wide-Ranging Tastes and Talents
The Londoner’s fourth mixtape mines Midwest emo, Afrobeats, grime, and more to concoct something new from well-established subgenres.

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.