New year, new Feng

“You having a good time?” Feng says to me from a roof, which hangs over a front garden full of Angelenos smoking cigarettes in skimpy leggings and graphic tees. The 19-year-old Brit poses dangerously close to the edge, gazing out into the night and freaking out his team members, who are chilling beside the window. Inside the adjacent bedroom, homies mill around a cushion imprinted with a $100 bill design and blankets covered in weed clip art. One of the scraggly guys who owns a room in this house, which is being lent to Feng for the show, tells me about all the musical legends that’ve passed through for performances. “Tell the DJ to play more party music!” Feng barks to someone I can’t see.

We’re at the rapper’s nearly-New-Year party on a quiet street slightly west of downtown LA. The exterior looks like the rickety abode from Monster House, but inside it resembles a post-prom bash teleported from the late 2000s. A plain wooden shelf carries red Solos and copious Fantas to mix with tequila. In one room, a projection of The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie casts a sickly glow over attendees’ faces. In another, Feng hops onstage (“stage” meaning a small table), his ripped green flannel and Bob Marley tee swishing as he judders to throwbacks like MGMT’s “Time to Pretend.” When the music cuts out during Katy Perry’s “California Gurls,” everyone joyously sings a-crowd-pella.

Lucy Bedroque’s in attendance, along with boylife affiliate Conceal, alt-pop darling Cece Natalie, and a random guy from Texas who tells me about how he fell into a convoluted situationship with his Uber driver. A TikTok nanoinfluencer known as @chronicshitterr, whose bio describes him as a “professional farter,” strolls around in purple shutters and a Bape hoodie, complimenting fits.

Feng keeps going until 4am. After the party dissolves, he goes to get a victory burger from IHOP with a bunch of girls. He doesn’t get lucky, though he says that’s on purpose: “Sex is a very enchanting thing… I would kiss people, but [sex]… I would only reserve it for a special lady.”

A couple of days later, on a rainy New Year’s Eve, I caught up with him and his friends as they shopped on Melrose. I found Feng flicking through jackets at 2nd Street Vintage, and he took us to a Starbucks down the block, where we sat in a corner and I tried to push my recorder close enough that his sedated voice could be heard over the speakers.

“I just picked something random. I have no idea what it is, but it’s very delicious,” Feng says as he gnaws on an iced white mocha with oat milk. Though the teen’s upcoming debut is called Weekend Rockstar, Feng doesn’t look much like a rock star. He’s more like a slightly dishevelled kid cramming in the library before A-levels. His clothing isn’t especially eye-grabbing – he’s wearing a low-key hoodie he just got from 2nd Street, with colourful letters spelling out CAMP HIGH. He’s calm and mostly sunny, with a faint edge of sarcasm.

That’s because, for the most part, Feng isn’t a rock star; his album title is as much aspirational as it is literal.  A year ago, Feng was nobody, and a year before that, he wasn’t even making music. He grew up in Croydon with two much older brothers whose love of hypebeast-era favourites like A$AP Rocky and Tyler, the Creator shaped his taste. Feng played football on his school team and worked as a lifeguard at a pool in Purley. He tried pretty much every method of YouTube virality to no avail – FIFA, short films, even Minecraft Hypixel and Bedwars gameplay.

Sex is a very enchanting thing… I would kiss people, but [sex]… I would only reserve it for a special lady

Then he started making music: little sketches of stray feelings and nights out, tiny capsules full of sweet girls, sipping absinthe, and watching the sun set on Primrose Hill. He really picked up steam with the debut tape What The Feng, whose standout track, “who do u wanna be,” challenges a new generation of kids to stop bedrotting and grab life by the balls.

Feng’s rise has been so sudden that, for a while, his family had no clue he was rapping; he worried his sports-and-education-oriented parents would disapprove. His manager and childhood friend Jah tells me they used to lie about what they were doing when they hung out. Eventually, though, his parents started seeing clips of him on TikTok. The first time, Feng denied it – but that didn’t work out for long. “They were a bit like, ‘what the fuck is this?’ And I was like, ‘Yeah I make music,’” Feng says. “And they were like, ‘OK.’ That’s it. It was kinda awkward. No bad blood, I think we’re cool.” Now he has over two million monthly listeners on Spotify, riding the rapidly rising wave of underground UK rap. 

While fakemink vacations with Frank Ocean and EsDeeKid slings Marty Supreme promo, Feng has the aura of a kid running a DIY operation. He wants to keep the dazed normality in his music – that kid with no resources, all cheeky moxie, doing whatever the fuck he wants – alive for as long as possible. “It felt really natural, it didn’t feel like anyone was there for any other reason but to have fun,” he says of the house party. “It was really just a London takeover; we showed LA how to party again. London boys do it best.” He scoffs at the idea of the industry muscling in and muddying his mission to spread good vibes. “Labels give me time at these big fancy studios in LA, but I don’t give a fuck, they’re shit. I don’t need to use their studios. It just sucks. It feels too, like, ‘Come here and make music.’ I sit down in the dark and I write shit, I write what I’m feeling.” Feng’s been recording at a desk in his temporary West LA residence; he uses BandLab and props up the mic in an empty roll of toilet paper. He forgot to buy a stand.

When we meet, Feng is at the tail end of a months-long LA trip. He’d only visited once before, earlier this year, but the experience was so lovely that when he returned to the UK, he immediately quit the post-school intern program he was in, tired of sending emails in an office. His favourite memory from this trip is arriving at the airport and being picked up by a friend in a car with no roof; Feng rode on top as they blazed down the highway, wind rushing through his hair. “Bro, I felt like I was in Spring Breakers or something, a stupid coming-of-age movie,” he says gleefully. “I felt like I was living the TV shows I watched as a kid.” He’s spent the last few months going to house parties, picking up vintage clothing at the Rose Bowl Flea Market, and obliterating casuals on the Venice Beach basketball courts. “I’m like Jeremy Lin. Actually not like Jeremy Lin, I was more like Yao Ming. Fengsanity x Yao Ming. I was just fucking killing it.”

Weekend Rockstar, which Feng says is basically finished and due very soon, offers a glimpse into how his life has changed since blowing up – blending the indie-pop obsessions of his childhood with the fast-life dopamine rush of meeting so many new people in LA. “What The Feng is good, but Weekend Rockstar is better. It’s going to be the best album of 2026,” he declares.

Paris producer Bilal Hamdi is the main other name on the album, and it’s entirely feature-free. Feng has trouble collaborating with other vocalists because his songs mostly capture fleeting feelings. He wants to wait till he can feature the “big, big people,” he says, listing longtime inspirations like Kid Cudi and M.I.A. “I text M.I.A. sometimes, but she hasn’t texted me back in ages, and I’m wondering if she’s OK,” he says earnestly, explaining that he sent her a screen recording of an open song she said she was gonna hop on – but he never heard back. 

Feng’s ethos revolves around uplifting. He urges people to “be themselves” and self-identifies as a “positive punk,” a “punk who wears colours,” in an attempt to subvert the ragebait and dark gloom that dominate the underground rap landscape. Despite some people assuming he’s homophobic because of Instagram comments where he said there was “not really an explanation for gayness,” Feng insists he has “loads of gay friends” and “loves everybody.” There are cracks in his uber-happy façade, hints of inner turmoil that positivity can only paper over for so long. He gets annoyed talking about two producers who tried remixing his song “XOXO.” “Bruh, it’s fucking ass. I need Diplo, I need Rattata. I need Skrillex remixing my shit. Not these wack-ass producers – and they’re stealing my music!” he moans. “They’re trying to make it seem like it’s theirs. Fuck them.”

“Skrillex is the GOAT,” he adds, before pausing and taking in my bright blue-green hair, then flashing a smile. “Bro, you lowkey look like Skrillex.” 

He also recently posted on X that he was quitting music, which he says came out of a “schizophrenic episode” where he flipped, instantly, from thinking he was making the best album of his life to the worst. He decided not to quit after a deluge of fans begged him to keep going. “I was like, ‘OK fine, I’ll come back to music.’ Just ‘cause the loyal commenters on X wanted me to,” he grinned wryly. “Shoutout X, cause everybody on X is definitely not toxic and crazy.” (His favourite platforms: “Instagram, YouTube, and then like, I dunno, the fucking Bible app. Wait no, that sounds so backwards.”)

It’s fucking ass. I need Diplo, I need Rattata. I need Skrillex remixing my shit. Not these wack-ass producers – and they’re stealing my music!

For the most part, he really is just a regular, albeit strange, dude. He says he doesn’t “have that much money to work with, so I’m just doing what I can.” He likes cigarettes and junk food. Feng’s friends offer me lore that makes his life sound like an Alan Partridge sketch: the time he went into a Tesco and tried to scan a raw croissant repeatedly until a security guard told him to keep it, because he “didn’t know that croissants don’t have barcodes.” They show me clips of Feng parkouring across precariously high roofs in Brixton. They laugh about how they spent Christmas Day assaulting each other with silly string, along with Feng cooking himself a special monstrosity of a sandwich piled with mac and cheese, pickles, Spam, and fries.

You’d be forgiven for doubting the significance of any of this – the prank-vlogger antics, the 80-second barely baked songs, the bizarre worship of music that was indie-famous when Feng was a fetus. His music isn’t really new, but it’s always a good hang. The 2024 song “Damn phone,” which circles the classic parental entreaty to stop wasting your life and go outside, functions like a little nudge of happy cortisol –listen to Feng, a kid like you, and live a little. Feng might not end up making the most groundbreaking music of his generation, but maybe the kid who does will be inspired to get off their ass because of “Left for USA.” Maybe he’ll inspire one more idling teen to ditch the finance-major future and throw a fucked-up squat rave.

When Feng returns to London, he’ll live with friends in a Brixton flat and go to his favourite fried chicken joint, Morley’s. He wants to repair his diet and start swimming again. At some point, the forever-fun lifestyle may fade: the free parties will become more of a hassle, recycling 00s pop will lose its lustre, and the industry’s demands will grow stronger. Until then, let’s rock.

Catch an exclusive look inside Feng’s ‘Nearly-New-Year’s-Eve party’ in the gallery above.