A self-contained hedonist finds himself stuck between two worlds.

SAMUEL HYLAND

This past March, the London rapper phreshboyswag, 22, was slurring his words in an Instagram Live broadcast, surrounded by nodding young men. “You guys don’t understand,” he said, peering out from a fur hoodie. “This whole UK underground you’ve been loving? It’s not the right UK underground.” Phreshboyswag is a shaggy-haired hedonist who favors platform boots and leopard-print pants; he raps in a despondent baritone, his distant affect complementing, or directly resulting from, his fascination with hard drugs. Stationed behind him, in the video, were various members of Dogworld, a scrappy London rap crew with whom Phresh, by then, had been tangentially associated. Two years ago, when Phresh was a scrappy upstart himself, he had largely abandoned London for New York, where he fell in with 1c34, another, more prominent, collective of eccentric teenagers. That crew, which has since disbanded, was spearheaded by xaviersobased, an outlandish skater-rapper who inked a deal with Atlantic this summer. In an early YouTube video, the collective are chain-smoking in the hazy living room of the “TrapGoth Mansion,” exchanging flimsy hand-clasps and hyping one another up. “Everyone just loves me here,” Phresh shrugs at one point, peering through pitch-black, too-big sunglasses. “I’m more for New York than I am for London. People fuck with me more here.”

“There’s a PR side to this shit. Motherfuckers love me, stay my friends, but will not ever publicly announce it. I’m still friends with everyone in 1c. Except…”

The following summer, Phresh was booked for a sold-out show at Market Hotel, a Bushwick loft venue revered for its decadent raves. One day before showtime, RADA, a young Russo-British rapper also on the bill, announced via Twitter that the event had been moved to a smaller venue in Williamsburg. That evening, ticketholders had received, via email, an oddly chipper PSA from DICE, the live music e-commerce company: 

Update!!! We are moving this show to Baby’s All Right. RADA & Suzy Sheers will be joining Take Van & BitGurl’s event.

Doors are at 9:30 PM, Suzy is on right away, and RADA is on at 10:00 PM.

Unfortunately we needed to remove Phreshboyswag from the event due to a recent controversy, we apologize to all who were hoping to see him.

See you in the crowd!

Earlier that afternoon, the New York rapper CLIP, 23, had declared, via Twitter, that she was done being “scared to speak up.” In a lengthy thread, she implicated Phresh, her longtime partner, in a saga of physical and emotional abuse, backed with damning photographic evidence: apologetic iMessage screenshots, a bloody towel, a bruised lip, and a profuse handwritten note, its janky heart doodle rendered in childish, pathetic scrawlings. Backlash was swift, and Phresh, a master of aesthetical distance, was now, for the first time, culturally distant, too: an underground pariah, banished, like Oscar Wilde, to the outskirts of his former milieu, whose attention he could no longer pretend he didn’t need. A month after the fallout, he posted a Twitter thread of his own, which, in theory, might have absolved him of certain misgivings—the blood, CLIP later admitted, was not hers; the apology note, too, was for a rushed goodbye—but in reality, made a complex situation murkier. The pair were largely dismissed, among fans and associates, as mutually abusive, a marginal Depp-Heard anecdote in another underground iceberg. Rumors began circulating that Phresh had been booted from 1c34. This past February, in another Instagram Live broadcast, he addressed his strained friendship with xaviersobased, who had begun publicly distancing himself: “You people don’t understand,” he guffawed, bare-faced and donning a hoodie. “There’s a PR side to this shit. Motherfuckers love me, stay my friends, but will not ever publicly announce it. I’m still friends with everyone in 1c. Except…” He grunted and side-eyed the camera, as if to say You-Know-Who. “He wanna say he’s my friend. But I don’t view what he’s doing as friendship.”

“Every ten years, there’s a revival of the last ten years. I’d like to think that I’m at the forefront of that whole aesthetic.”

Deserted by his New York circle, Phresh moved back to London, where he attempted, in fits and starts, to revive his sputtering career: joining Dogworld, playing shows, talking shit. It seemed to be an uphill battle. Hackers took control of his Distrokid; every other day, his catalog was deleted from Spotify, and his artist portrait replaced with a crude Telegram promo. This past winter, he beefed bitterly with Osamason, a 1c-affiliate whose new album, Jump Out, had catapulted him above not only his meager beginnings, but his aspiring rival, who waited outside of a sold-out show to fight him, but was greeted, instead, by his crazed fans, shivering in the cold while their hero—and Phresh’s opp—was whisked away in a lavish SUV. By March, when Phresh bashed “this whole UK underground you’ve been loving,” he seemed, for the first time, more partial to London than America: “Everyone just loves me here,” he had said in 2023, and within two years, it was no longer true in New York. The problem, for London’s prodigal son, was that the city he abandoned had found newer people to love in the meantime. Two days after the Dogworld livestream, the London rapper YT, a winsome 23 year-old Oxford graduate, released Oi!, a fun-loving opus that cemented him as a fixture of the UK club circuit. (“I’m the biggest thing in London, man, I’m bigger than the Ben,” he rapped on one track.) The previous month, the Croydon rapper Feng, a nerdy 19 year-old whose mother is unaware of his career, released What the Feng, a debut album of lighthearted—but, occasionally, movingly honest—autobiographical sketches. In its most somber track, “Left For USA,” he awaits the return of a brother who goes to America:

Damn, I really miss my brother, he left for USA

Hollywood Boulevard, he must be living great

I’m stuck in London, that’s why everything look gray

We FaceTime, but it’s not really the same

I can’t wait for you to come back home

For Phreshboyswag, a hedonist who left for the U.S. in search of riches and fame, this might have sounded somewhat familiar. The sole, damning inaccuracies: no one was waiting for him to come back home, and now that he finally had, no one seemed to care.

“Wake up, get my dick sucked, cash flowing / Took her to my penthouse, yeah she’s got a big butt / I’m so powerful, yeah, I’m all-knowing / She’s in my room and it’s her body that she’s showing.”

Phreshboyswag is not a good rapper, which makes his intentionality, as an artist and auteur, somewhat difficult to pinpoint. In the spring of 2023, he released rock bottom, a disorienting debut album that felt, and sounded, like a long, dreary drug binge. This was, above all, his primary thematic concern: not only the bloghouse era, but its powdery detritus, the coke and ket and desiccated vomit lining its bathroom walls. “Every ten years,” he said in an early interview, “there’s a revival of the last ten years. I’d like to think that I’m at the forefront of that whole aesthetic.” While indie-sleaze, by then, had quickly become shorthand for electroclash, Phresh seemed interested in a darker underbelly, the bloody fringes of nostalgia-tinged decadence. Here was a dropout with comically-large sunglasses, too-tight leopard-print pants, and a drunken, baritone drawl—a bumbling caricature, not necessarily living his raps, but embalming himself in their excesses. His droll delivery, arrhythmic and off-key, clashed directly with his dystopian jerk beats, cooked up by snare-happy nihilists like Clay10 and ss3bby. Peppered throughout rock bottom were soundbites from various bleak documentaries: a woman hopelessly addicted to Meth, a daughter dying of anorexia, a medical expert warning patients about Ketamine. As a piece of music, it was a dumpster fire. As a piece of anthropology, it was an immersive, if not harrowing, document of addiction, despair, and the hopelessness hiding behind every hedonist. It was kind of heartbreaking.

When I think about rock bottom, and its horrendous, accidental potency, I think of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, a notorious drunk who seemed, often, to stumble upon his intoxicating talents. In 2020, the writer Sheldon Pearce compared Return To the 36 Chambers, his magnum opus, to “watching a delirious man wander into a busy intersection,” avoiding oncoming traffic by “sheer luck or divine intervention.” If ODB was impressive for his improbable escapes, Phreshboyswag was impressive for his ignoble ennui, the resolve to not only remain paralyzed, but perform paralysis, like a ghost doomed to reenact its final drinking spree. The cascading snares were moving vehicles, and Phresh was perpetually in the middle of the road, getting run over, stumbling to his feet in a drunken stupor, then getting run over again. In a strange way, this made his sparse, random moments of coherency feel incredibly cathartic. On “throwing up,” a shocking instance of prolonged on-beat delivery, he slithered between oscillating kick drums, deadpanning like a zombified junkie: “Wake up, get my dick sucked, cash flowing / Took her to my penthouse, yeah she’s got a big butt / I’m so powerful, yeah, I’m all-knowing / She’s in my room and it’s her body that she’s showing.” These were, at best, juvenile exploits: the “dark recesses” of a middle schooler who has just discovered pornography. But in his lifeless cadence, less reliving than languidly reciting, there existed a deeper, more unforgiving, notion of what “underground” could mean—not only the underbelly of mass culture, but its ability to chew you up and spit you out, babbling and bleeding and barely remembering any of it.

“Black British Music. We’ve been making asses shake since the Windrush.”

This considered, it feels logical that Phreshboyswag, a bruised addict with a dwindling support system, would bristle at an uplifting “underground,” teeming with likeable characters and feel-good stories. To an extent, he is correct: the preeminent UK underground is not, in fact, “the right UK underground,” because it may no longer constitute an “underground” at all. Last fall, the London rapper Jim Legxacy, a hard-working 25 year-old, signed to the indie powerhouse XL Recordings; earlier this month, he released Black British Music (2025), a polished LP that pulled equally from pop-punk, Afrobeats, garage, and R&B. This past July, when Drake headlined the London hip-hop festival Wireless, he made a lofty claim: “No disrespect to America. No disrespect to my country. But nobody can out-rap London rappers.” During his set, he brought out not only Skepta, the UK monarch who bade war against the US, but Fakemink, the ascendant London rapper who studied Drake at 10, became a Pitchfork darling at 20, and seems well on-pace to be headlining Wireless by 30. Two years ago, phreshboyswag—a New York rapper who just so happened to be British—heralded a reclamatory era of UK rap, not necessarily fleeing to America, but doing with jerk what stateside rappers had done with London drill. He belonged to London the same way Alaska belongs to the United States. Like clockwork, the second he returned was the second he stopped being part of it.

A month removed from Legxacy’s opus, there seems, more clearly than ever, to be a racial politics to the UK underground(s), uniting new champions and further alienating old ones. Midway through Black British Music (2025), a deep-voiced DJ delivers a tag, which doubles as a provenance statement: “Black British Music. We’ve been making asses shake since the Windrush.” The term “Black British Music” claims no particular sound, genre, or crux, but a disposition of displacement—the curse of wondering where home is, and the burden of determining, for yourself, whether or not it is here, on colonial soil. If the Windrush scandal, seven years ago, marked a fissure between British bureaucrats and Caribbean immigrants, then it is instructive for Legxacy to christen it a starting-point: “making asses shake,” not since 1999, when he was born, but 2018, when he was told he didn’t belong. Uplifting as their music often is, there is a defiant undercurrent to the new faces of UK rap, recasting rootlessness as a platform for recontextualization. On the opening track of his latest album, YT is hyped up, profusely, by Kai Cenat, who plays a light-hearted interlocutor: “Got the UK fuckin’ flag on his back… He got the UK flag on his fuckin’ back, I’m not gon’ lie.” It is funny, but on another level, also indicative of a broader movement: A nerdy Black kid bearing the UK flag like Lebron, an Algerian-Indian prodigy declaring himself “London’s Saviour,” a Chinese born-again Christian lavishing in the transition, among his peers, towards the “more authentic and British.” For Phreshboyswag—a white man who was not displaced, but voluntarily left, only to return and find himself ostracized—this demands a difficult distinction: British-ness as a playable card, or British-ness as the card one has been dealt. He has never had to ask himself these things, and now, threatened by people who spent their lives grappling with them, he doesn’t have the questions, let alone the answers.

“Off the K, yeah it got me so delayed / I’m so sexy, put my body on display.”

In a brief clip posted to TikTok last April, a drowsy phreshboyswag—designer puffer coat, bedazzled jeans, fuzzy boots, pitch-black shades—is stranded, helplessly, on a staircase. Two young men are guiding his legs, one by one, step after step. He looks senile, pathetic: stiff-limbed, mouth agape, clinging to the railing for dear life. In the background, there is faint, nervous laughter, interspersed with motivational-speak: “You’re okay, Mack. You’re okay. Let go of the railing, Mack.” The assumption, and a good one, is that he is feeling the effects of Ketamine, an aggressive anesthetic he both espouses and embodies. On “paris,” a brooding track he’d released earlier that year, he bragged, listlessly, about his deadening habit: “Off the K, yeah it got me so delayed / I’m so sexy, put my body on display.” For a rapper nicknamed “Phreshboysexy,” it feels interesting, often, that his sex appeal is largely stunted by his substance abuse, a sickness poorly disguised as a schtick. Ironically, every time he does put his “body on display,” it is not for lustful eyes, but concerned ones: proving that he can play a show, that he can walk down a staircase, that he can speak without slurring his words. Not long after the first staircase clip went viral, a new one resurfaced, on TikTok, with the caption “bro finally did it.” As of this writing, it is the most viewed Phreshboyswag video online: a cocksure Phresh, cigarette in mouth, clomping down a flight of stairs, flashing middle fingers. It is a victory, and the fact that it is a victory is very, very sad.

“For 8 years I performed to an audience of none, My biggest fan was my laptop screen. Believe in yourself for 10 years n see where it takes you.”

The tragic thing about phreshboyswag, and musicians like him, is that his artistic peaks are inextricable from—or, worse, contingent upon—his personal pitfalls. Last summer, a few months after the first staircase clip surfaced, he released VIP, a slight sophomore album he had teased, online, for the better part of a year. When I first listened to it, I was impressed, but also somewhat disappointed: he had become a better rapper, which, in turn, made him a significantly less interesting artist. What felt special about rock bottom, in retrospect, was its perpetual falling-apart, performing its own drug-addled decay. Hearing that album, immersing yourself in it, was like watching the original staircase video: a case-study, a cautionary tale, that denied you the clarity of being completely entertained or completely heartbroken. It was confusing, and that confusion made you want to keep listening—desperately trying to grasp it, until, at some point, you accidentally fell in love with it. VIP and beyond, Phresh has shed some of this confusion, which, in some ways, is great: better flows, better beat selection, better ability to stay on said beats. The troubling thing, for us and him alike, is that in refining his art, he has effectively become trapped, predictable. His fleeting moments of coherency no longer hit as hard, because they are no longer fleeting. His superlative hedonism no longer feels shocking, because it no longer complicates his songcraft. His self-destruction, novelty removed, is nakedly that: suicide, increasingly devoid of what once made it entertaining or excusable. 

The “wrong” UK underground is endearing, in part, because it is teeming with underdogs: people who waited their turns in private, and now get to smell their flowers in public. As I write this, Fakemink, reeling from his first magazine cover, is rapidly earnest-posting on Twitter: “For 8 years I performed to an audience of none, My biggest fan was my laptop screen,” one tweet reads. “Believe in yourself for 10 years n see where it takes you.” Midway through his new album, when YT sneers “You ain’t gotta tell me, always knew that I would make it,” it is cocky, but also earned: a kid who started as a meme, refused that reputation, then proved, with a smile on his face, that he was worth taking seriously. Phreshboyswag is trapped in a certain character, which sucks, because that character is an aimless wanderer—completely alien, in spirit, to an era of ambitious upstarts chasing (and largely achieving) their dreams. Hidden in “Hard 2 Get,” a rock bottom highlight I think about often, is a cheap, nomadic rhyme: “5 AM in the moonlight, you know I wander / Will I make it, That’s what I wonder.” Where the UK underground is compelling for its social mobility, Phreshboyswag, its prodigal son, was once compelling for his aversion to movement, unless it was across the Atlantic—a Zoomer Dorian Gray, ditching his home for decadence, and trying, desperately, to cling to a life without consequences. Now, begrudgingly back home, he is grappling with a difficult one: he is not as loved as he would like to be, and maybe, he never was.

“I don’t wanna be back home / I don’t wanna be back home / I don’t wanna be back home / I can’t survive without my bros.”

Phreshboyswag is no longer active on Twitter, but when he was, he often used it to plead for more time in the United States. This past January, two months before he claimed the UK underground, he bristled at the prospect of living in its midst: “being in london again is like waking up from a really good dream and waking up and realising everything’s shit.” With his American dream freshly dead, his music, in turn, has felt deathly, more pantomiming his past than taking pride in his present. And for all his privilege, I understand: what more can his difficult path forward—rehabbing, rebuilding, recovering—offer than the weightless life he left behind? In the repetitive chorus of “what was it for,” a wrenching track from 2024’s my autumn diary, he begs, wearily: “I don’t wanna be back home / I don’t wanna be back home / I don’t wanna be back home / I can’t survive without my bros.” Every time I hear it, I think of “left for USA,” and how deeply its narrator, trapped in dreary London, wants to see his brother again. I imagine this brother finally returning, flicking on the lights, and finding the house empty.

SW.