“C is album of the year,” rushes Lucy Bedroque, as I ask for any closing comments to our interview. The London heatwave is crushing my laptop’s ability to function and the audio momentarily folds into static. I ask if they’re referring to an upcoming project. “Yes,” they mutter shyly from their bedroom in Los Angeles.

A bedroom is where it began for Bedroque, real name Jeremiah Mark. When the pandemic hit in 2020, the Bronx-born artist was still in eighth grade. While their classmates logged onto video lessons, Bedroque’s attention was elsewhere. “I think I was making a beat a day,” they tell me. “I wasn’t going to any of my Zoom meetings or anything, so I just took the time to create as much as I could.” When they weren’t making music, they were consuming anime and drawing at a similar rate.

Just a year ago, the artist released Unmusique, the project that pushed them further up the increasingly complex iceberg of internet music culture. Powered by breakout tracks such as “2010 Justin Bieber” and “Yes, You May”, the record introduced a wider audience to his cacophony of blown-out 808s, emo-rap, and fragmented shards of digicore and rage. “The project actually aged well in a way I didn’t think it would,” they admit. “I wasn’t expecting it to have the longevity that it has.”

Bedroque has fitted a lifetime of wins into the year since it dropped, touring across the United States, booking up festival slots and opening for artists including rage-star Jane Remover and EDM-princess Ninajirachi. Most recently they posted up at the rap-haven Rolling Loud Festival in a full Chrome Hearts custom fit, sandwiched in the lineup between names like OSAMASON, CHE and Ken Carson.

Just days before, a group shot taken backstage at the festival, featuring the singer alongside various other Mount Rushmores of the scene, made its way across niche meme pages. I try to gauge where Bedroque is at with their relationship to this growing visibility. “I think I now interact with fans very differently from how I used to,” they explain. “There was a lot more grace back then, because it was a much smaller circle of people. I’m trying to gauge what makes sense to respond to and what doesn’t,” they say. “I literally just turned 20, like, two weeks ago, so I feel it’s kind of difficult to work out.”

When it comes to classifying their sound, that same uncertainty carries over. “I think six years of a career is very rookie numbers,” they tell me. “I feel like I’d need at least another five or six to even think about having some kind of label. I feel like I haven’t done enough to give myself a title.” While it still feels too early to pin down any fixed description of the music they make, they land on: “At best, I just say it all leads back to hip hop.”

But the singer is far clearer about what shapes their visual influences, tracing much of it back to their early exposure to television and internet culture. “I wasn’t allowed to watch TV past 9pm,” they laugh, recalling the shows – including Pokémon, Digimon and Dragon Ball Z – that they would try to catch before curfew. “The nerdy side of the internet is where I nailed my interest and figured out what I like,” they add.

Their early history as a music fan, meanwhile, was shaped by bands like My Chemical Romance and System of a Down. “I was listening to a lot of nu metal and alternative metal when I was in fifth grade, and then I dove more into the SoundCloud scene and went down a whole rabbit hole of artists,” they say. Despite their quiet demeanour, Bedroque doesn’t shy away from collaboration, having collaborated with peers such as Kuru, Jane Remover and Slayr. “I think working with a lot of the Sad Boys / Drain Gang members would be cool – especially Ecco2k because he’s one of my favorite artists of this generation,” they say.

For someone who insists they’re still figuring things out, Bedroque seems far more certain about what comes next. “It’s a trilogy type project,” he explains. “It’s C, then there’s another project that’s an EP, and then a final LP in the winter.” “This project is a mix of almost every project I've worked on,” they say, adding that it is designed to speak to both newer listeners and what they call the “Lucy Bedroque veterans”.