At the core of Jim Legxacy’s music is a potent clarity of emotion. The London-based musician’s 2023 mixtape Homeless N**ga Pop Music deployed samples like globs of glitter spread across a posterboard: a Miley Cyrus song, the watermark for a Nigerian MP3 website, a snippet from the U.K. grime classic “Homerton B.” The project tapped into an almost spiritual energy, with personally specific bits and fragments fluttering between Jim’s warm, effervescent vocals. “I think sometimes your emotions will speak to you in a different language,” Jim says over Zoom in January. “But I feel like when I start making beats — or I start creating — I feel like Google Translate. I can write something that connects to myself.”
“I’ve always struggled with religion,” he continues. “But I feel like whenever I make a song where I’m connecting to how I feel, it genuinely feels like God is in the room.”
The project gained the U.K. musician a cult following eager for even the smallest hints of new music — often delivered in the form of ephemeral snippets posted and then quickly deleted on Jim’s TikTok. For the past few years, he’s been working on his follow-up, titled Black British Music, which is set to be released this year via XL Recordings. The child of Nigerian immigrants living in Britain, Jim says the project is an effort to carve out a musical identity for other first-generation Black Brits whose parents originate from Africa or the Caribbean. “A lot of us are technically the first British people in our entire lineage, and that has a huge cultural impact,” he says. “Our identity is still at a point where it’s malleable. We’re figuring out what that is.”
In February, he dropped the music video for the single “Father,” a track that samples George Smallwood’s “I Love My Father,” and features co-production from the buzzing U.K. underground artist YT. The video, directed by Lauzza, takes on the popular early 2000s graphic design aesthetic Frutiger Aero, a visual sensibility that defined an era of British youth culture close to Jim’s heart. In the video, Jim goes through the motions of catching the city bus to ride to school — uniform and all — before goofing off in class with his friends and later playing Xbox in his bedroom, all while ruminating on an absent father. Clocking in at just under 90 seconds, the track manages to fill an entire universe, the kind of tight narrative structure they teach in writing programs. “She said she grew up all alone, had no father,” he raps, conjuring the sample’s emotional frequency for the last word. “She’s independent, wanna spend my monеy on her/She said I shouldn’t bother.”
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Raised in the southeast London neighborhood of Lewisham, Jim often untangles complicated feelings about his life growing up on the last stop on the Elizabeth line, an area that sees among the highest crime levels in the city. More than hard-nosed raps about a life molded by violence, Jim finds narratives of lightness and love in even the most desolate circumstances. Still, heartbreak cuts through the loudest, and it’s Jim’s sense of the architecture of heartache that lingers with repeat listens.
One of HNPM’s breakout singles, “Old Place,” for instance, maps quite cleanly on any long-lost love. “If you came back in my life/I had to decide whether I want you to stay or turn away,” he sings. “I would give you your old place back.” The song is, in fact, about his relationship with his father. While he doesn’t say much about his past circumstances, he’s described being homeless and living on friends’ couches during the period of time when he was making HNPM. Then, not long after the record came out, tragedy struck Jim’s family as his younger sister passed away. He released “Nothings Changed” early last year in tribute. The song’s tender emotional resonance speaks to the feeling of loss on a nearly elemental level.
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“I’ve had a terrible two years,” Jim says candidly. “I’m hopeful that it’ll get better. It’s interesting. Sometimes I think, like, ‘Am I just a pessimist? Am I just someone that looks at my life and, regardless of what status or where I am, where I get to, I’m just going to always think it’s shit?’ Because that’s low-key where I think my head’s at. But I’m always hopeful for the future.”
He says things are better with his family these days. “There was times where I had little petty beefs with my dad and shit, but since my sister died, I think everyone’s just calm. Everyone’s just like, ‘All right, we’re here,’” he says. “When you think about family, it’s just a bunch of strangers that you’re forced to chill with. You don’t get to pick them.”
Jim does have some more positive memories of his dad, who he says “used to play loads of music” when he was a kid. “I was never interested in it,” he says. “I felt like I was just absorbing it like a sponge. There was never a point when I was a child where I wanted to make music.”
He says that changed when he first heard Kanye’s The Life of Pablo in 2016. “When I heard that, it just moved me,” he says. But what really moved the needle for Jim was seeing kids in school freestyle. “I would be like, ‘Huh, that’s epic. I want to do that.’ And I remember getting involved and being absolutely terrible, but I kept going because I enjoyed it so much.” Before then, Jim’s interest in music came from electronic mixes, wrestling entrances, and anime theme songs.
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In 2019, he released his first tape, Dynasty Program: A Metrical Composition Inspired by the Nights Spent as the Raiider, which had the kaleidoscopic sonic sensibility of Life of Pablo but with a melodic instinct that immediately takes center stage. As a rapper, Jim has a flow that recalls Dave, whose punchy and invigorating delivery is a hallmark of U.K. rap. His ability to balance his singing with rapping is where he stands out. He followed up with 2021’s Citadel, a more cohesive project that placed Jim’s vocal talents front and center. Standout “Ghost Recon” balances sweet-sounding acoustic guitar with stuttering drum rhythms and feather-light vocals from Jim that tie it all together. “I think Citadel was the first time I dropped something, and I remember getting loads of messages every day, like, ‘This is crazy,’” he recalls. “And I was like, ‘Wait. What? You guys are feeling this? What the hell?’ I couldn’t believe it.”
Except, he sort of had a feeling he was on to something. “I remember, when lockdown happened, I was like, ‘No, I’m going to make something special,’” Jim says. “And I honestly feel like that’s what this [new] project has felt like as well. I just feel like, with this, I’ve taken so much time because I just want it to be perfect, man. And I’m finally at a point where I’m listening to it top to bottom, and I’m like, ‘You know what? Yeah, we’re close. We’re getting there.’”
