If you’re a fan of Miley Cyrus’s seminal 2010 album Hannah Montana Forever, then one particular sample on Jim Legxacy’s new mixtape might fall on familiar ears. “I’m just an ordinary girl!” exclaims Cyrus in her pre-teen warble on the cleverly titled “Ordinary Girl”. At the zenith of her Disney fame, it was a track artfully engineered to convince hordes of tweens that she was in fact Just! Like! Them! Now, on Homeless N***a Pop Music, Legxacy repurposes the song for his own emotional needs, splicing lines of Cyrus’s vocal with his own to create “mileys riddim”. On the track, the musician is characteristically wistful (he’s “just so scared of losing you again”) and the childlike 2010s sample intensifies his yearning. At one point Legxacy and Cyrus’s voices unite, proclaiming “I would always miss the things that seem so simple”, in perfect harmony.

To a Jim Legxacy rookie, “mileys riddim” may seem like an odd choice, but the musician has always been interested in expanding the definition of what it means to be young and Black today. “Black Britain is entering its weird n***a phase”, the musician recently told Dazed, in our Spring 2023 print issue, “and I want my music to communicate that the mandem can make whatever”. It’s a sentiment that’s on full display on the new mixtape, as the artist hops from the emo-Afrobeats of “amnesia111” to the mellow indie guitar of “fake smiles”. Legaxcy also never shies away from deep emotional excavation, his lyrics a masterclass in frank and honest songwriting. “Why would you leave me in this house to burn down?”, he asks on “call ur dad”, “we were a team, and you abandoned all our dreams.” Legxacy is no ordinary talent, and HNPM places him at the vanguard of Gen Z creatives forging new and diverse musical ground.

Elsewhere Avalon Emerson reinvents herself on new pop record & the Charm, The National returns with First Two Pages of Frankenstein, and yunè pinku takes us to Babylon.