Jam Baxter

An outlier in the landscape of UK rap, Jam Baxter is the scene’s premiere surrealist. Beginning his career as part of foundational hip hop collective Contact Play, the emcee experimented with boom bap, narrating the mucky stories of a misspent adolescence. But following his sophomore solo release on High Focus – The Gruesome Features – he slid further and further away from realism, constructing his own nightmarish visions of a world subsumed by vice and venom. His breakout single, “Brains”, would come to crystallise this emerging style: an allegory about drug use and dissociation, centreing around a shady brain salesman and the degenerates that keep him in business.

Baxter took on collaborations with Rag N Bone Man and Kate Tempest. He fled the UK for the blazing climates of South America, Vietnam, Spain and Mexico – each country giving him a new vantage point from which to view his ashen home city. Baxter last settled in Mexico, having built a web of new foreign collaborators.