“Being Gen Z is engendered by a feeling of hopelessness in the face of a world built and shaped before our input. The life and death of countless movements that would’ve stood opposed to colonialism, capitalism, every fucking -ism, really occurred decades before we came to be. In the wake of the ‘end of history’ we are born into a landscape where the consolation prize we feebly and gladly accept as reparations for our participation in humanity’s death is consumption. Constant consumption. [...] The children of post-modernity, New Labour, and born in the shadows of Thatcherism represent a lost tribe that are now assigned the name ‘Blair babies’.”

That is how 23-year-old Lambeth rapper opens his second mixtape, blair babies, released last month. It’s a powerful encapsulation of Gen Z Black British experience, and the political nihilism that many of this generation feel. But, beneath the surface, these same words stand as a mission statement for a new wave that has swept the UK’s musical underground over the last year. Many will be familiar with the scene’s leading lights – EsDeeKid, Jim Legxacy and Fakemink – but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Welcome to ’UK Ug’. 

At any other point in history, these artists would likely not be lumped under the same umbrella. EsDeeKid’s sound is abrasive and murky, Fakemink’s is sugary and colourful, and Jim Legxacy’s is erudite and historically cognisant. Between them, influences range from Drain Gang to Drake, Dean Blunt to David Bowie, and Sneakbo to Skrillex, yet each of these artists find their names uttered in the same breath, posted on the same Instagram fan page round-ups, and sometimes even featuring on the same songs. How can this be?

Ceebo’s blair babies manifesto seems to suggest that the UK Ug label is defined by shared Gen Z experience, rather than a specific sound. “There’s a huge spectrum of sounds being made, but they all belong together because they’re influenced by the same things,” Ceebo tells Dazed. “In earlier generations, you listened to what was around you, whereas our generation grew up in a time where you could listen to anything on the internet. So, for someone like myself, I’m influenced by drill, grime, the traditional things, but there’s also these idiosyncrasies in including stuff like bedroom pop and amapiano – it’s just reflective of changes in the habits of consumption. The music we make is a melting pot.” 

The internet is written into the fibre of UK Ug itself. For the most part, the legends of artists like Fakemink and EsDeeKid have been written not on websites like this one, but in TikTok comment sections, Instagram fan pages and Reddit memes. Take, for example, the now-ubiquitous term ‘newgen’ – a pejorative coined to describe latecomers to an artist’s fanbase – or the (likely unserious) trend of Reddit users selling screenshots of EsDeeKid’s Spotify profile before the fame, allowing fans to escape ‘newgen’ accusations for a fee. These terms are defined by context, regurgitated endlessly online until no one’s quite sure who actually came up with ‘newgen’ or ‘UK Ug’ first. In truth, everyone’s a newgen to some extent. 

Ceebo identifies this digital pervasiveness as just one aspect of the confusing and ‘hopeless’ world that Gen Z have inherited, but it seems to have shaped UK Ug sonics themselves. Although the scene is disparate, one of its very few sonic hallmarks is an underlying distortion. Beyond the burst 808s of the trap and plugg scenes preceding UK Ug, this distortion is all-consuming – a chaotic, almost distracting digital fuzz that engulfs much of standout projects like EsDeeKid’s Rebel, Sinn6r’s Federal and TeeboFG’s RIDDLR. On some level, it’s the sonic equivalent of a world that moves too fast to make sense of.

Deeper still are the varied and often time-warping percussion patterns found within UK Ug. Most prominently is the jerk rap beat first popularised by West Coast groups New Boyz and Audio Push in the early 2010s, and later reimagined by British artists Fakemink, YT and Oopsy. Elsewhere, Sinn6r’s US-flag-fronted mixtape Federal returns to the OG Chicago drill stylings of Chief Keef, and Ceebo’s blair babies segues directly from Fruity Loops grime packs into shuffling amapiano rhythms within the first two tracks of the project. This diffuseness is a defining trait of UK Ug, speaking to the geographic and historical flattening that characterises the intensely online Gen Z experience as a whole. 

Still, in the middle of all of this chaos is an unmistakable beauty. Each of the artists mentioned has inherited a complicated and all-too-often unintelligible world that politicians are unable to provide answers for. Somehow, they have managed to transmute this generational befuddlement into something both globally compelling and culturally resonant. While hopelessness might be a common experience among UK Ug’s Gen Z architects, their shared talent and vision, at least, contains subtle hope for the future. 

Below, we spotlight five corners of the UK Ug scene, from the nihilistic Sinn6r to spiritual singer-songwriter Svn4vr, but also make sure to check out the playlist above for a more comprehensive guide. 

CEEBO

Ceebo is something of a UK Ug mouthpiece, and blair babies is his manifesto. His tag, 3:16, is a twofold reference to both the Bible verse John 3:16 and the WWE’s ‘Stone Cold’ Steve Austin. “The reason why I reference [Austin] is because he was a symbol of a general feeling at the time,” Ceebo explains. “Gen X watched the Cold War play out, the Berlin Wall fell, Capitalism won, Reagan was right. The End of History, as Francis Fukuyama put it, was written. But it didn’t feel like the utopia that was promised. That disillusionment left that generation with a lot of anger. Then, this bald man with a take-no-prisoners attitude came along and he didn’t care about the establishment. A lot of people saw themselves in that. Today, those feelings haven’t gone away, they’ve only got worse, and Ceebo 3:16 was my take on that dream.”

It’s an ambitious mission, but fortunately one that Ceebo achieves through showing, not telling, in his music. Created in the same studio sessions as Black British Music, Jim Legxacy contributes production to multiple tracks on Ceebo’s Blair Babies, and both projects share an overarching philosophy of celebrating Britishness in its most expansive – and radical – sense. Ceebo’s music emerges out of a melting pot of influences: the Congolese sebene traditions of his father, the Ethiopian classics played in the internet cafes of his Lambeth stomping grounds, and the dual pillars of UK grime and drill and US rap that dominated Gen Z British listening. “In 2018, if you asked me who my favourite rapper was, I would’ve said Kendrick or Loski,” he sums up neatly. 

YOUNG EMAN

If we’re talking UK Ug’s ability to transmute chaos into beauty, then Sheffield’s 20-year-old Young Eman’s current hit “popstar in da bits” is a prime example. Filmed outside of a rundown housing estate, the track’s music video makes no attempt to glamourise working-class British culture. Eman and a crew of hoodie-wearing, gum-bubble-blowing teenagers screwface directly into the camera, and at one point, a white van speeds past as the driver screams “Fucking chavs!” out the window. Still, the crew defiantly sing the track’s refrain: “I’m a popstar in the bits”. And they’re right, it might not be pretty, but the track is just as catchy and culturally resonant as any pop hit should be.

More widely, Young Eman first made waves at 17 years old in drill platform Blackbox’s “Hardest U18s Cypher” before becoming an early adopter of the new scene. His delivery is reminiscent of Mostack’s anthemic choruses of the 2010s, but recontextualised against menacing and distorted UK Ug production.

SINN6R 

If Ceebo represents a political hope and religious salvation in UK Ug, then south-east Londoner Sinn6r represents the flipside: its stark nihilism. Taking cues from the US drill scene before Ilford’s 808Melo invented the sliding 808, Sinn6r delivers tales of street-level crime and childhood hardship with his distinctly militant, army drill sergeant-like cadence.

He’s a frequent collaborator of men-of-the-moment EsDeeKid and Rico Ace, and similarly manifests their unique collision of machismo rap and misanthropic emo aesthetics. “This tight-ass shirt might look LGBTQ to you, still I might fuck up your boo” he raps on Federal highlight “Me & You feat. TeeboFG”.

SVN4VR

Just when you thought you had UK Ug figured out: enter Svn4vr (pronounced ‘seven forever’), the sonic lovechild of Playboi Carti and Bob Dylan, and virtually represented by High School Musical star Corbin Bleu in almost every online appearance. Yes, you read that right. There are traces of folk protest anthems in the anonymous Hertfordshire artist’s heartfelt, guitar-backed lyrics, but it’s delivered with the lo-fi crunch emblematic of UK Ug more widely.

It’s an inimitable style, and one that exemplifies Ceebo’s conception of UK Ug as a sociological label, rather than a sonic one. Despite harking back to years gone by, Svn4vr’s music speaks directly to Gen Z British experience, with his latest project Postgrad chronicling the painfully familiar experience of graduating university into a dwindling job market (“i need a job!!!”), global crises (“this is my first year as the batman”), and spiritual deficit (“stop talking to AI talk to god”). 

LEDBYHER 

Starting out as a ‘bedroom drill’ producer, 21-year-old Norwich-raised rapper Ledbyher turned everyone’s heads with the release of murky, new wave jerk track “Daydreaming Made Me Blue” at the start of this year. Her subsequent releases bear many UK Ug hallmarks – conflicted distortion, time-travelling percussion – but infused with Ledbyher’s own twist. Her music is slightly softer than her contemporaries’, incorporating subtle vocal melodies and more ethereal production, while – perhaps reflecting her names’ origin in William Wordsworth’s epic poem “Prelude” – lyrical references are more ephemeral and timeless. UK Ug might be a lot of things, but female voices have so far been criminally underrepresented in the scene, and Ledbyher stands to show that this is a crying shame.