Kwengletarianism: How Harrow rapper Kibo founded his own religion

Last month, I rode the Bakerloo dragon to the Gates of Kwengletaria. It was a pilgrimage, an hour-plus journey to the mythical ‘Harrow-juku Swag District’ (or, alternatively, ‘360 No-Scope-Nhagen’) on the outskirts of London, where I was to meet with cherished rapper and Kwengletarian figurehead Kibo. He greets me in grey trackies, rocking a small, Guy Fieri style-goatee and long, flowing hair – altogether looking more like a weekend rockstar on any given Tuesday than a spiritual leader (and certainly more like both than London’s most sought-after MC). “You’re northwest maxxing now,“ are among his first words to me, wielding slang with the gravitas of holy scripture.

Of course, much of this is hyperbole, borrowed from Kibo’s colourful lexicon. The Bakerloo dragon is actually just London’s crustiest underground line, the Gates of Kwengletaria are the ticket barriers to Harrow & Wealdstone station, and ‘Harrow-juku’ is, in reality, a dying high street whose biggest claim to fame is the first ever Sam’s Chicken joint. But fantasy and reality have a strange way of blurring into one in Kibo’s presence. In fact, that’s the first pillar of Kwengletarianism.

“Kwengletarianism is a school of thought that I dive into on my new project,” Kibo explains of his upcoming sophomore album, Kwengletaria:Ragamyff, released today (July 3). “The three main pillars of the religion are: finding the myth in the mundanity; the Yin Yang balance between The Kweff and The Cotch – you know, we’re on a Cotch right now, but this could easily turn into a Kweff; it’s all about finding that sweet spot. And the last one is: everyone is The Guy. I’m him, the greatest motherfucker that ever lived. But so are you, and me being sick doesn’t stop everyone else from being sick, too. If you have to put someone else down to be The Guy, then you were never That Guy.” 

He uses the aged Irish pub we’re sitting in as an example. “The idea is that it’s all about perspective: there’s plenty of people that come in here and might not enjoy it but, for me, it’s the best,” he says. Behind him hangs a picture of a Limerick hurling team from the 1960s.  “You know, most people would come to Harrow and be like, ‘There’s fuck all to do here.’ But I just sold out [local venue] Trinity in an hour. I’ve given people a reason to come here.” At its core, Kwengletarianism seems to be a rallying cry for outsiders everywhere. 

Born a third-generation Irish immigrant in the HA3 postcode of Harrow, at least four Bakerloo line stops from any tangible hip-hop history, Kibo’s rise has been that of an underdog, hard-won through various now-endlessly-quoted freestyles across the web. His bars tread an inimitable line between London lore, niche anime references, and cartoonish exploits – lines like “Roll with a badaman team like Koffin and Ekans / Roll with a Spice Girl with the Victoria Beckhams’” and “Life is a bitch, one boomting yat / The game is bossman’s fridge: the coldest ones all stay at the back,” to name just two. These lyrics have since cemented him as one of the city’s most respected MCs – perhaps the biggest example being when Streatham superstar Dave crowned Kibo the ‘people’s champ’ during a Victory Lap radio freestyle in 2023.

“I always tell people, if you want to understand my music, Summer Wars is essential reading. I’m just dubbing the anime of London”

Still, Kibo has always plied his own trade. Alongside Yung Lean, he cites Japanese anime director Mamoru Hosoda (whose work includes 00s cybercore flicks Digimon: Our War Game, The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, and Summer Wars) as his biggest inspiration. “I always tell people, if you want to understand my music, Summer Wars is essential reading; it’s got this mix of both surviving the internet, and also surviving a very family-centric, out-of-the-way life,” he tells me. “There’s this weird period in late 90s, early 00s, where dubbed is actually better than subbed anime. [The localisation team] added all these regional Western references and humour that would never have been in the original. It’s very Kwengletarian in that respect. It’s what I’m doing, too – just dubbing the anime of London.” 

Despite his prolific reputation, however, going into 2026, Kibo only had one song on Spotify. His debut album, 2022’s FBFR4: FUEGO BABY FURTARDO RETURNS (SORRY 4 DA LONGNESS), was a comically turbo-powered rap project that featured song titles like “FEELIN LIKE PETER ANDRE”, a remix of the infamous Lloyds TSB advert song, and, crucially, the first canon mention of Kwengletarianism on swagged-out single “TOP FLOOR BUSINESS”. But to quote Avatar: The Last Airbender, when the world needed it most, it vanished – mysteriously pulled from DSPs just a few months after release. 

“Basically, all of [fellow rapper] YT’s music was being nuked for a while because some random breh from west-bumbafuck-nowhere had somehow copyrighted the name,” Kibo explains, dispelling very serious rumours that Lloyd’s TSB were behind the sting. “I caught a stray in all of that. Instead of removing the song with him, they nuked the whole project. I didn’t have a team then – I still don’t really – and it was such a fucking faff getting it back online. By the time we were able to get it back up, we were starting to come with this project…” 

So, what has he been up to all this time? “I was making music every day in that whole period but I just didn’t feel like dropping anything,” he says, shrugging. “At the time, my answer would have been: I’m getting booked for raves, I’m able to pay my bills through music without having to actually drop any of it. I’m just having fun making it. Also, if I’m being completely honest, I made more money on BandCamp in the month that FBFR4 was nuked than I ever did with the project on Spotify. People actually cared enough to pay money for it.” 

On “TOP FLOOR BUSINESS” I say “I just put two and two together and made a Megazord.” That’s some real shit. A lot of people put two and two together and make four… boring! 

It was also during this time that the Ragamyff began to take form. “I’ve been ‘big Kwengletaire’ for a while now, that’s taken from Caribbean slang. But it was around 2021 that I really started to figure out what it meant for me,” he explains. “In the same way that Lil B had ‘based’, I wanted my own – and, for me that was Kwengletarianism. I started dropping little nuggets, like on ‘TOP FLOOR BUSINESS’ where I say ‘I just put two and two together and made a Megazord’. That’s some real shit. A lot of people put two and two together and make four… boring!” 

In January 2026, Kibo broke his three year silence – not with a song, but with a 15-minute documentary titled Ragamyff, sort of like the Kwengletarian equivalent of the Bible. In it, Kibo’s reflections on “finding the rarity in something that might otherwise be perceived as a bit shite” emerge as more than just platitudes of manifestation: they’re also subtly political. “Our generation is cooked; everything I looked up to came through a screen,” Kibo announces in the film’s closing minutes, as nostalgic cuts of Dragon Ball Z AMVs and early Dipset freestyles flash on the screen. “But this idea of fantasy also built a framework for a better idea of what the world could be.” 

This colourful world-building forms the central, and in some senses only, function of Kwengletaria:Ragamyff. “I was like, let me just give you my whole backstory, the myth behind the murkage,” Kibo explains. “It’s not about making the craziest hit record, it’s not even about my best performance as a rapper, it’s just the foundation. After this, the website is going to launch, and I can just flood the internet with all this cool music that people can tap in with or not. It’s been a long and difficult road to get here, and I’ll have earned the right to just have fun and express myself.” True to this spirit, Kibo tells me that he has a ‘hidden project’ called Now That’s What I Call Yerrr in which he delivers karaoke versions of songs by Ben Howard, Natasha Bedingfield and Spandau Ballet.

But back to Kwengletaria:Ragamyff – a project that marks a turning point in Kibo’s career. Far from the grime sets he has become known for over the last three years, perhaps the best sonic reference for the project is Mamoru Hosoda’s sugar-coated cybercore aesthetics of the early 00s – an Iglooghost-coded, hyperpop homeworld that portals into the multitude of UK sonics across its 16 tracks. There’s the drum ‘n’ bass of “Zero Fux (Sim Card Samurai)”, garage two-stepper “Headside In Da Skiez”, and even donk on “ShubzOnline”. The project’s beating heart, however, is the decidedly more traditional rap cut “Red Starz”. 

“Our generation is cooked; everything I looked up to came through a screen”

“‘Red Starz’ represents building your own mythology out of the mundanity you see growing up,” says Kibo. “When it gets to seven o’clock in Limerick, the lights go out and you can see all the stars. Here, there is no North Star because there’s so much fucking smog and murkiness. Instead of stars, we have the anti-aircraft lights on cranes erecting these monolithic structures across the city. Nine times out of ten, I’ll never have access to these buildings, only the 0.0001 per cent will ever actually walk into them. But I can take the lights that come out of them and turn them into something that matters to me.”

It’s a powerful image. For Kibo, these cranes – and the luxury flats they are in all likelihood erecting – represent the stark disillusionment that permeated his childhood, a metaphor for a city just out of reach. Through Kwengletarianism, however, he has inverted them into a symbol of hope: a utopia salvaged from dystopia, a fantasy Frankenstein’d from the media overload so often used to epitomise Gen Z’s ruin, and a resolution to continue dreaming when all odds are stacked against us. Kibo interrupts my monologue: “I struggle to talk about it in a way that helps others, that all feels a bit wanky. It’s given me purpose, at least.” 

We finish off our Guinnesses – which, true to Kibo’s words, was starting to take on the quality of holy water – and step out into the northwest London sunshine. Kibo tells me he’s taking me to his ‘studio’ (I would later learn that this, too, was another kwengletarianism – it was actually a shed with a laptop), but, first, we stop by Sam’s Chicken. “They used to do this deal called ‘Two for Two’, that’s two chicken burgers and two fries for £2,” he recalls, scrolling through the shop’s newly installed digital menu screen. He laments that the closest deal is now £8.

From there, Kibo ducks into an off-license for a Rubicon and a bottle of Captain Morgan, and we eat our feast on the Bakerloo dragon down to Stonebridge Park. The train ride is exclusively above ground, and the Harrow skyline stretches for miles around us, decrepit factories giving way to new highrises perennially under-construction. London’s loading screen, I think to myself. It practically invites daydreaming.

Leaving the station, Kibo weaves through row upon row of suburban housing until we reach the entrance to the ‘studio’: a rickety garden gate topped with barbed wire. “The Gates of kwengletaria,” I mutter, preparing myself for what fantastical musical exploits might await me within. At that moment, a figure appears from behind the rotting wood and tries to unlock the gate. It’s stuck fast and whole fence shakes around it. Kibo breaks the awkward silence: “Looks like the Gates of kwengletaria are in need of some WD40.” 

Kwengletaria: The Ragamyff is out now.