Bloodzebra, the new collaborative album from Chinese rappers Bloodz Boi and Jackzebra, is a riddle: it contains both profound significance, and also evades any concrete understanding. 

This is partly due to both rappers occupying singular and inimitable places in music. Jackzebra, whose garbled Mandarin lyrics saw him achieve international virality at the start of 2025, is sort of like if Future was a plugg artist that spat deep ruminations about Chinese post-industrial society. Bloodz Boi, meanwhile, is China’s cloud rap pioneer and paragon wrapped into one, being both a smuggler of early Yung Lean and Bones records into the Chinese internet in the early 2010s, as well as continuing to release some of the country’s now-thriving rap culture’s best releases over ten years later. The latter was once the former’s mentor but, on Bloodzebra, both emerge as masters of their distinct schools of rap.

Written into these careers, however, is an extra layer of encryption: their unique straddling of western rap influences and Eastern culture and lyricism. A chief example of this is two pieces of advice that Bloodz gave to Jack back when he first expressed a desire to make rap music – firstly, to never rap in English, and secondly, to title Western internet uploads in English to maximise searchability. Considering that Jack’s own mumble rap lyrics are unintelligible even to native Mandarin speakers, this entails a paradox in which the meaning of Jack’s music is simultaneously prioritised and totally disregarded – a sort of two-factor authentication that precludes understanding from 99 per cent of listeners (and certainly the remaining one per cent have very little overlap with the devoted fanbase of New York’s Surf Gang records to which Jack is now signed). 

This elusive quality takes centre stage on the new Bloodzebra album, which was recorded by the duo in two hotel recording sessions in late 2024 and the summer of 2025, and for which Jack specifically sought out New York-based, Syrian producer .cutspace to exec-produce the project. Fittingly, .cutspace himself isn’t a Mandarin speaker, likens his own artistic process to asemic writing (in which words and images are combined in a way that denies semantic meaning), and whose role on the project was to select beats for the Bloodzebra duo’s consideration; beats that were, in .cutspace’s words, “more ambient, glitchy and collage-like in nature”. 

“I saw Bloodz and Jack as artistic foils in a sense, with Jack as more expressionist and chaotic – like a Pollock painting – and Bloodz more restrained and orderly where it counts – like an Agnes Martin,” explains .cutspace. “Order and chaos, or, I guess, the ‘edge of chaos’. The balance of soothing ambience and harsh cuts and electronics. Fine brush stroke calligraphy and unbridled, messy blotches of ink. The sonics were designed to reflect these opposing but cooperative energies. That, to me, is Bloodzebra.” 

These analogies are useful because the madness of Bloodzebra’s music also conceals a deep social significance. Running in parallel to the project’s futuristic, alien-sounding vocals, and dystopian sci-fi album cover (created by 3D artist and also not-a-Mandarin speaker @first_mistake_forever_more), Jack’s lyrics – when transcribed, that is – express a very Gen Z kind of disillusionment. “[On] ‘NPC’ I rap ‘Pressing relentlessly, it’s all a performance, don’t speak, it's a murder mystery game’,” Jack tells Dazed of his favourite lyric on the project. “The lyrics mean that we live in a play, we just need to live according to the script, and not say anything.” 

It’s a dystopian twist on the sinofuturistic ‘Chinamaxxing’ discourse currently dominating the west, and one that, in Jack’s words, was inspired by listening “to the noise outside of the hotel“ that they were recording in. When asked how he would describe the sound of the project, however, Jack uttered one word only: “Schizophrenia.” Bloodz Boi echoes: “Yeah, I have schizophrenia, and I've been taking medication for 18 years.” 

Bloodz’ favourite lyrics, meanwhile, seem to revolve around sending subtle shots at other corners of the now-thriving Chinese rap scene, much of which he himself influenced. “‘The sound of your abacus clicks better than your singing. My only flaw is I’ll always have less hair than you’ – you got more tricks, I got less hair,” Bloodz translates of his own lyrics. “I don't really care about the scene. I’m just doing my thing and taking care of the people around me.” Elsewhere on the project, he raps: “When I have a poor appetite, I will bump Jackzebra, those REGULAR RAPPERS made me lose my appetite,” seemingly casting shade on fellow new-gen Chinese rappers Billionhappy, Sebii and Chalky Wong who released a song titled “Regular Rappers” last year.

Rap posturing aside, these lyrics nonetheless acknowledge the explosive moment in Chinese rap that Bloodzebra releases within. “It’s very raw now, but in a good way, I think we need to cherish these next few years, we are living in a very rare time,” says Jack. “[I’d describe it like] a Chinese movie called 疯狂的石头 (Crazy Stone) – just like in the movie, some people are happy and some people are crying, nothing much just crazy.” Presumably, Jack is comparing the rough gem of Chinese rap music to the film’s titular jade stone, which is fought over by a motley crew of gangsters and businessmen to slapstick effect in the film. The exact meaning of this, however, in typical Bloodzebra fashion, seems to be left up to interpretation. 

Indeed, even these breadcrumbs of context seem to leave some aspects of Bloodzebra fundamentally out of reach. Bloodz Boi himself admitted that he initially didn’t understand the project, writing on his blog: “After finishing this album, I listened to it multiple times, and my initial feeling was one of misunderstanding (was it too experimental? Or a test of compliance?). But I gradually discovered its enjoyment. Now, I would say this is the album I wanted.”

Jackzebra, on the other hand, seems to talk about the album with an almost esoteric regret. “I didn’t really want to do it in the beginning because it was too deliberate; it didn’t happen naturally, but I finished it anyway, out of respect for Bloodz Boi,” he tells Dazed. “I don’t like deliberate creation, and that won’t happen again.” Bloodzebra contains riddles upon riddles, and that also makes it undeniably compelling. 

Bloodzebra is out now.