When it came time to share the release announcement for his new album earlier this month, Jim Legxacy was sitting on the bulbous black leather couch inside his family’s modest apartment in the Lewisham area of London, posting the info himself.
For a few minutes, he was fully absorbed in his phone. “My head is on fire, bro,” he gasped, excited at the intensity of the response. Texts and calls were coming in. His Discord channel was losing it. Bingo, the family’s mini dachshund, wandered around the room, looking for a rope to gnaw on.
“I’m not a celebrity yet — I’m still on the ground level,” he said a little bit later in the afternoon, getting some air after the thrill of sharing the news had subsided a touch. He was dressed plainly, all in black, no extravagances besides a crisp pair of red and black Nike Shox R4. “I still live here. I’m with the people, so it’s like why would I try to like auramaxx, or like, try and pretend there’s a gap, bro? There’s not a gap.”
And yet just a couple of weeks earlier, Legxacy, 25, had been walking these same streets alongside Dave, one of the country’s most revered rappers, filming scenes for the video for “3x,” their collaboration from Legxacy’s new album, “Black British Music (2025).”
“They was in shock,” he said of his neighbors. “It was like Tupac, bro, it was mad.”
Being able to bring one of England’s biggest stars to a quiet street in southeast London would suggest that Legxacy — born James Olaloye — already has capacities far beyond the circumstances of his raising.
“I truly believe in myself and I truly believe that I am doing and I will do super-incredible things — I don’t even think we were purely at the precipice of whatever I’m going to end up doing,” Legxacy said. “But that being said, that’s only going to happen if I work hard. And I just think thinking things like that might inspire complacency.”
There is no evidence of that on “Black British Music (2025),” an elegant and affecting album that’s clearly the product of an active mind and a wistful spirit, blending raw emotional vigor and easeful song construction.
“How do I make a futuristic version for the present based on what has existed in the past?” Legxacy wondered. That productive tension manifests as a unifying patina on songs that hopscotch among myriad genres, from hip-hop to folk, engaging with several recent currents in Black British music while perfecting a sound not particularly beholden to any of them. Legxacy’s true palette is history and memory, and the way that personal experience can metastasize in unexpected creative ways.
Much of the album was forged in the fire of familial crisis: He said his mother had suffered a stroke, his older brother was being treated for psychosis, and his sister died from sickle cell anemia. Though he was derailed emotionally, he took solace in knowing he had a way to process.
“I was like, it’s calm, because I get to work on this,’” Legxacy said. “There’ll be a day I’ll get to show people that they can overcome anything.”
He’d already made that clear on his outstanding prior release, “Homeless ______ Pop Music” (2022), an album that feels like the act of remembering. “Everything I chose was chosen to illustrate some form of comfort that existed in the past,” he said of that work, nodding to the influence of the hip-hop impressionist MF Doom. Much like his generational peer and friend PinkPantheress, Legxacy has alighted upon a sonic framework that weaves a musical memory into a tapestry of the present, leaving the listener suspended in a state that’s both alert and dreamlike.
Legxacy studied graphic design in art school, where he learned about the power of collage, and about how process could be more powerful than product. “My teacher would always make me make something and then she’ll be like, ‘All right, cool, now that you’ve made this, cut this up then try and make it into something completely new.’”
He only began making music at 19, after coming across Kanye West’s 2016 album “The Life of Pablo.” “I was like, what do I need to learn? How do I make something like this?”
He’s spent most of his time since thinking about how to build layered worlds within his songs. In the downtime between albums, Legxacy read Carl Jung and studied up on Ernest Hemingway’s life. He researched his favorite wrestlers and the video game designer Hideo Kojima in order to better understand world-building in art.
“Black British Music (2025)” is full of Easter eggs for those steeped in the last two decades of it, little nods to older songs by the rapper J Hus and the singer-rapper Kojo Funds, and the “Eski” sounds that shaped early grime. He also points the music forward with his wide range of collaborators: Fimiguerrero, a rising rap star; and Dexter in the Newsagent, an eerily talented acoustic soul singer.
And of course, there’s a guest spot for Dave, who a couple of years ago brought Legxacy in to help with production on “Sprinter,” a 2023 collaboration with Central Cee that became an instant classic of British rap, and also the rare song from that world to become a global bling anthem. “I remember going in multiple times and trying to get it right,” Legxacy said. “There was like a meticulousness to it because I knew what it meant to the culture.”
His previous album was almost wholly a creation of isolation, a fact that he said kept him from existing in the shadow of any one elder or scene. But “Black British Music (2025)” is the product of Legxacy finding community, one in which he is quickly becoming a lighthouse. He maintains an active Discord channel full of fans and, increasingly, musical collaborators.
“I’ll start something and I’ll screen share it and be like ‘What do you think, guys?’ Send it to like four different people and they’ll send something completely different back, all of them,” he said. From those, he’ll pick a direction, then piece together a new work from the disparate options. “They would push it in a way that I wouldn’t see and I would take what I like and cut and then do the same.”
Legxacy said he’s been comfortable with online friendship going back to his teenage days playing Xbox Live. “They’re all so respectful,” he said. “I’ll be like, yeah, guys, I’ll show you a song, please no one screen record. I won’t see no leaks. I won’t see nothing on YouTube.”
By evening, he was in an Uber heading to the Catford district, where he sneaked into Tasty African Food a few minutes before closing. En route, he learned that diligent fans had discovered that Dave would be featured on the album, which had previously been a secret. Legxacy was sanguine and sympathetic to their eagerness, because he’s eager, too.
“I’ll do anything to preserve my imagination,” he said. “Even though I say a lot I’m still holding back. There’s still so much more I want to say.” Most nights, he said, he stays up until sunrise, or later, his brain racing.
“I’m constantly like, ‘What if I sleep? Who’s gonna think about this [expletive]?’”
Jon Caramanica is a pop music critic who hosts “Popcast,” The Times’s music podcast.
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