‘Emo boy got the party lit’: Inside the UK underground’s identity crisis

This story is taken from the spring 2026 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally now. Order a copy of the magazine here.

There are several points on EsDeeKid’s debut album Rebel where he calls himself emo. On “Phantom”, the Liverpudlian MC, always pictured ballied up in luxury streetwear, rolls up to the motive like an “emo boy, I got the party lit”. On “Mist’ he boasts about his “long black hair like an emo” in the same breath as his calibre of drugs. They’re unlikely invocations of the famously withdrawn, self-deprecating stereotype that formed when emo hit the mainstream in the 2000s. At the same time, the mix of emo, trap, jerk and drill influences in EsDeeKid’s sonic and visual identity, while unique, isn’t totally out of the blue. In a post-genre landscape where the cultural barriers separating artists have long since eroded, a masked goth rapping about estate kens wearing antique silver gauntlets and a Benny’s Video shirt makes perfect sense.

Still, there’s a culture clash happening within EsDeeKid’s music – a collision of alternative aesthetics and working-class life and lingo that feels new. EsDeeKid seems to be aware of this himself (in November 2024, he posted the following to X: “chav bird said i’m sexy for a emo”). In the mid-2020s, youth culture in the UK is overwhelmingly made up of chav and emo touchstones – two subcultures that emerged in tandem and made their comebacks on TikTok, partly owing to gen Z nostalgia for an era before tech ubiquity trapped us all in a death spiral. However, while both took root in the 2000s, they couldn’t have been more opposed.

Chavs and emos were born natural opps. The chavs were resented by the emos for their perceived allegiance to material “excess” and idealised beauty standards. And, like goths before them, the emos were bullied by the chavs for projecting an image of emotional weakness and wearing weird jeans. For the duration of the 2000s, British adolescence for many was just one long turf war over who got to do poppers in the local park bandstand. The two sides were diametrically opposed, often to the point of violence. Which is a shame, really, since they probably had more in common than they would have liked to admit. Both were maligned subcultures with a derogatory label attributed to them from the outside – “emo” being, effectively, a gay slur, and “chav” a demonised caricature of the working-class. Both used their image, like all teenagers do, as armour for their insecurities. For better or worse, both made a thing out of wearing concealer as lipstick. 

Two decades on and that hostile relationship is barely recognisable. The internet has largely obliterated hardline allegiances to a particular “tribe”, and the subsequent conflicts between them. Instead, every movement or music genre in modern history has gained relatively equal footing in the algorithmically driven, grab-bag collection of material that now makes up the cultural imagination. Divorced from their original social contexts (and often the prejudices that came with them), everything is fair game to be rifled through and reinterpreted, like William S Burroughs cutting up a page of text and rearranging the sentences.

There’s a culture clash happening in EsDeeKid’s music–a collision of alternative aesthetics and working-class life and lingo that feels new

Though emo is often thought of as a trend tied to millennial “Myspace days”, it has been a consistent presence in pop culture for decades, fully absorbed by the mainstream by the mid-00s. Musicians who grew up watching hardcore shows in people’s basements sat next to Nelly and Beyoncé in the charts, their sound fusing with genres it would have sharedlittle to no connective tissue with initially. That’s just how it goes in commercial spaces, where disparate acts are thrust into the same ecosystem – when New Jersey emo legends Thursday signed to Island Def Jam in 2002, one of their loudest advocates was Kanye West mentor Lyor Cohen. By the start of the 2010s, it became one reference out of many. The DNA of mainstream emo has informed almost every subculture that has emerged since, from K-pop to hyperpop, and can be felt everywhere in the chart landscape; Billie Eilish, the 1975, Olivia Rodrigo and even Taylor Swift have all tapped it for inspiration. Emo’s most significant and enduring influence, though, has come through rap. 

In the late 2000s/early 2010s, the boundaries of emo and rap began to blur, either through collaborative efforts (Fall Out Boy and Lil Wayne’s “Tiffany Blews’), new fusions like crunk-core (an abrasive mix of crunk and hardcore) and however you want to categorise Gym Class Heroes. The advent of backpack rap, while not emo at all in terms of production, carried its traits of introspection and sensitivity into different territories. Kid Cudi gave way to Yung Lean and the Sad Boys, who gave way to Juice WRLD and Lil Peep, who gave way to Machine Gun Kelly releasing a single called emo girl featuring Willow Smith that was produced by Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker. And on it goes. Of all those movements, the Sad Boys era – solitary and avant-garde – has left the most lasting impression on contemporary youth culture, including the new crop of UK underground (“UK Ug”) rappers like EsDeeKid, now mixing chav and emo aesthetics.

EsDeeKid and his collaborators Rico Ace and SINN6R all draw from a broad church of references, from David Bowie to Skrillex and $uicide Boy$, building worlds that are equal parts introspective and antisocial. Lewisham’s Jim Legxacy has also spent the last few years blending emo, drill, glitch and Afrobeats into a patchwork sound that mirrors the chaotic circumstances behind it. (His debut mixtape, Homeless N*gga Pop Music, was recorded during a period of homelessness.) Norfolk bedroom drill producer Ledbyher is also putting her own spin on things. Her 2024 track “LEECHES” opens with a public service announcement about the criminalisation of “colour”, asking people to “submit any remaining vibrant emissions to local enforcement centres”. It plays over a monochrome montage of rave and riot footage. Kids with face tattoos, winged eyeliner and mouth jewellery mean-mug the camera before it pushes into a tower block, where Ledbyher – looking every bit like the average My Chemical Romance enjoyer – begins a contemplative verse about feeling drained of energy.

In the 00s, British adolescence for many was one long turf war over who got to do poppers in the local park bandstand

Still, as jarring as it might be to anyone over the age of 30 to hear emo invoked in the context of getting the party “lit”, it’s not these references that feel unusual in UK Ug. It’s the chav ones. A part of what makes this particular combination of influences so distinct is just how British it all feels. There has been a resurgence of chav culture more broadly. Earlier in the decade, a viral “chav makeover” TikTok trend had creators from all over the world over-drawing their eyebrows and plastering on foundation in an attempt to pass as the average “Nicole in Year 10” circa 2004. It felt loaded with all the same prejudice seen in the 00s, punching down at a type of girl damned by wider society as vulgar. It did, however, put the archetype back on the map. More recently, chav-era signifiers – digicams, labret piercings, cropped puffer jackets with fur hoods – have resurfaced more affectionately in the context of embracing social dissidence and “digital rebellion”. All of that is rolled out in the video for Sheffield rapper and producer Young Eman’s current hit “pop star in da bits”. Shot like a Channel U classic, it features kids in tracksuits and big hoop earrings swigging cans and hanging out in economy cars on a council estate. 

Meanwhile, scores of text-over-video social media pages like @lordoldgen mine the aspirational, Grey Goose-drinking, bassline-loving Brit culture of the 2000s for “banter”. Then there’s @Vuncle205, a TikToker from Alabama obsessed with all things scouse who spent summer 2025 getting the badge in at Anfield stadium and smashing Toby Carveries. While most of it is tongue-in-cheek, there’s a degree of affection for this lost world and its characters, unburdened by the self-awareness that digital existence has brought. In fact, part of the chav stereotype’s appeal now is its grit, individuality and utter contempt for anyone else’s opinion – exactly why it was admonished in the first place. 

You’ll notice that most UK Ug artists hail from outside of London, which feels relevant when thinking about their particular reworkings of turn-of-the-century subcultures. Though hardly regional constructions, the chav-versus-emo binary was much more prominent in smaller cities and towns. Their presence was more obvious, and their tensions heightened, if only by virtue of there being little else going on. The vast majority of UK emo artists tended to come from rural and post-industrial areas, the most prominent ones clustering in south Wales and northern England. These are the exact same economically abandoned areas where the chav construct thrived, since it was largely deployed as a way to mutate working-class identity from a proud and organised workforce into a mindless bunch of criminals in knock-off Burberry.

It’s in places like Sheffield and Liverpool that chav and emo subcultures clashed most prominently, while at the same time being forced to coexist. Over time, the two were simply thrown into the same cultural soup, where the emotional responses held by their original enthusiasts dissolve into an intriguing and frictionless “past”. If you want to deep it further, you could say that both identities in the first instance had a gravitational pull for teenagers who felt failed by society, and so found their own ways to reject it. Looking at the doomerism and absence of opportunity that defines the economic landscape for gen Z, it’s not surprising that Y2K subcultures are resurfacing now, forming a new hybrid that has given us drill beats with midwestern guitar riffs and trap-house anthems about emo lads doing packet in a Lamborghini.

But mostly Y2K emo and chav are simply longstanding subcultures with strong visual languages, making their way into the hands of British teens for whom pre-digital tribal allegiances carry absolutely no weight. They’re in the mix along with everything else. Hence: this summer EsDeeKid will be playing the annual UK hardcore festival Outbreak, shouting lyrics in thick scouse about Jürgen Klopp at an event headlined by Deftones. The old world is dead, and the new world doesn’t even realise.

This story is taken from the spring 2026 issue of Dazed, which is on sale internationally now. Order a copy of the magazine here.