The FADER’s longstanding GEN F series profiles the emerging artists you need to know right now.
YT says he’s always felt like an outsider but one that people eventually realize is ahead of the game. The 22-year-old rapper with a degree from the University of Oxford is at the forefront of a wave of U.K. artists leapfrogging the domestic rap scene and taking their swagger global. Forged through Discord servers and Instagram DMs, his cohort has the goal of reshaping the overground in their distinct vision. And sitting in the lounge of a north London studio where he spends hours punching in bars, YT says their success is all but guaranteed: “We know that we’re undeniable and that this shift is inevitable.”
Dressed in a pair of Mowalola LDN joggers and a Palace jacket, YT remembers his days as a Supreme-obsessed kid growing up in Romford, east London. He started rapping as a teenager but only began taking music seriously when he went to university. Thanks to lockdown-era virtual learning, he’d have lectures open in one tab (camera off) and FL Studio in another. People asked him how he balanced studying French and philosophy with music, but “the truth is I didn’t,” he laughs, admitting that he ignored a lot of what he was being taught. He calls himself a “generational crammer” who only finished his degree at the behest of his Nigerian parents.
Discord also proved more exciting than text books. In the late 2010s he joined a forum home to Escape Plan, a collective of like-minded artists and new friends including kwes e, Cmillano, and phil. They would bounce creative ideas off one another and trade technical hints; the vocal preset YT uses to this day is one he learned about from the group. “That was literally all we did every single day, morning till night,” he says now, looking back fondly at riding out the lockdown hours by creating music and posting it on SoundCloud.
YT and kwes e are now refreshing the sound of their country’s rap scene. Joined by boundary-pushing peers including XL Records signee Jim Legxacy, the glitchy and chaotic fakemink, and the trio of Fimiguerrero, Lancey Foux, and Len, whose 2024 album Conglomerate acted like an Avengers-style crossover event for the crew, they’ve become the new face of the evolving U.K. underground.
“We know that we’re undeniable and that this shift is inevitable.”
“I hear people ask, ‘Is the UK underground just one group chat?’ And I laugh because lowkey it is,” YT says. “We genuinely have a text chain together.” He says there isn’t any competition within the group, apart from when it comes to playing FIFA or Call of Duty online, and that they are legitimate friends, not simply co-workers. He points out that he’s known Legxacy since 2019, though they only made their first song together [“Father”] in 2025.
“We built this ourselves, there was no infrastructure,” YT says of this tight-knit group. “People can call us weirdos but a lot more people are starting to tap in now.”
YT first noticed people paying attention when his 2021 song “Arc’teryx,” a minimal chill rap track named after the gorpcore brand, blew up on TikTok. Fun, flashy, and with an eye for fashion, it bore the hallmarks of what's now YT's quintessential style. But its success felt complicated. “I started getting emails from A&Rs offering me five and six figure deals [for the single],” he recalls. Despite never having imagined music becoming a career, YT declined the offers. “I knew if I signed that deal the label would expect another ‘Arc’teryx’ but I understood that it was a unique viral moment,” he says as the light catches the gold caps on his teeth. “It felt like more of a meme and then I would be trapped into recreating something that wasn’t repeatable.”
YT took two things from this flirtation with the music business: an unwavering faith in his own artistic path and a way of showing his parents it was something he could make money doing.
From there he made 2023’s #STILLSWAGGIN, a creative breakthrough that leaned into the late 2000s to early 2010s Cali’s jerk era with a British twist, with mentions of cricket and the high-end London department store Harrods. Though YT remembers living through that era of music (he watched YouTube tutorials on how to Dougie as a child), he admits it was contemporaries like Xaviersobased and YhapoJJ who ultimately inspired him to make a project filled with light-hearted raps over spluttering drums and cloudy synths. “When I found Xaviersobased,” he says, “it was so stripped back but what he was saying was so profound to me.”
YT sees that swag era as an antidote to a stagnant musical culture right now. “There's just this carefreeness and sense of fun,” he says, namechecking O.G. influences Young Sam, The Rej3ctz, and Marvel Inc alongside the new guard. “I stopped trying to come up with crazy punchlines and could just repeat a line like ‘Pocket full of money, got my trousers falling down’ eight times in a row without worrying. I didn't expect people to gravitate towards it but when they did, I doubled down.”
“We built this ourselves, there was no infrastructure. People can call us weirdos but a lot more people are starting to tap in now.”
His 2025 album OI!, aptly named after a British slang term used to get someone’s attention, takes the jerk sound and pushes it, no longer feeling like an artist imitating a previous decade but one owning the current moment.
I tell YT that what makes his music so refreshing is what also makes him a confounding presence. He’s a U.K. rapper in the truest sense, filling his bars with cheeky colloquial references, yet he rejects the grime and drill scenes that have dominated the last two decades of British rap. Instead, he looks to the internet underground for influence and works exclusively with the friends he has made online. “I’m Black and I’m British to the core,” he states. “But I’m also undeniably influenced by American sounds and I love whatever chemical reaction occurs when you mix those two things.” Waiting for an invitation to be part of the in-crowd is overrated. YT has found a more effective way forward. Build your own world and wait for everyone else to catch up.
