Jadasea, The Camouflaged Link In Groggy Underground Rap

Asking Jadasea about his new album title, Holly Grove, it feels like I’m playing a game of multiple choice. One moment, it’s a poignant tribute to his home. The next, he just chose it because he thought it sounded cool. Kicking back in his friend’s garden on a sunny London afternoon, he settles for something like all of the above, with an emphasis on hometown inspiration and immediate practicality. 

“I wanted to name it after something where I’m from,” he tells me. “But [it’s] not my actual road, so people can’t track me down.” With his laconic tone and a tendency to rap in ellipses, Jadasea can feel pretty elusive in his music, too. Blending misty beats, monotone vocals, and abstract songwriting, the 31-year-old has stood as one of London’s most idiosyncratic stylists since emerging as part of the Sub Luna City collective with King Krule 12 years ago. Through a cross-the-pond osmosis between himself, MIKE, and Earl Sweatshirt, he helped inspire the fusion of formless, associative poetry and dreamy soundscapes. It’s a connection that’s rarely been more legible than on Holly Grove, a project Jadasea says began as the result of hangout sessions with his frequent producer, Harrison. 

At 17 songs and about 31 minutes, Holly Grove is a haze of fragmented ruminations and beats that sound like a foggy morning. Jadasea threads it all with flows that can drift or accelerate through double-time, while his deliberately under-enunciated bars can make his tracks feel impressionistic. He swirls the elements together on tracks like “Intrinsick,” where he connects self-medication and themes of loyalty and existentialism with a poet’s eye for metaphysics and a spitter’s syntactic precision. 

While artists customarily work toward new sonic aesthetics, Jadasea would say this one’s more like a throwback — specifically, a nod to the Blitz project he dropped about six years ago. He’d already evolved his sound, but fans at shows would ask him to perform Blitz cuts during sets for more recent music. His range made it easy to revisit the older sounds his fans loved: “I'm always doing everything.”

Years before he was rapping, Jadasea was a Peckham kid with a voracious ear. Locally, he gravitated toward the sounds of SN1 and Giggs, who both emerged from the area. Looking to the States, he absorbed the sounds of Yasiin Bey (fka Mos Def), Dilated Peoples, and Kanye West. His mom put him onto Jay-Z, who Jadasea praises for his dualistic approach to songwriting. “It’s smart wordplay mixed with local, ‘if you know, you know’ stuff,” Jadasea tells me. “If you can talk to your people and the masses at the same time, that’s one of the secret recipes.”

By age 15 or 16, Jadasea began working on his own rap recipes. While he was influenced by Giggs’ road rap stylings, he knew he couldn’t accurately or meaningfully rap about street life. So, taking some inspiration from Earl Sweatshirt and Wiki, he decided he had to get a little more creative. “That’s what led to my style — the abstractness,” he explains. And yet, as a high school dropout, there was a more primal need, too: "When you're that age, you're just trying to vent something."

Some of those venting sessions spilled out on the internet when Jadasea, along with King Krule, released City Rivims Mk1 as Sub Luna City in 2014. Decidedly lo-fi, the tape was as disorienting as a midnight shrooms trip through Epping Forest. It was also just a prelude to a Jadasea run that would begin a few years later.

During the same period, a 16 or 17-year-old rapper by the name of MIKE traveled to London to rap with his own collective Slums. There, he linked up with Jadasea to make some music, and in between collabs on tracks from projects like Half-Life (2019), Old Earth (2020), About Time (2020), and Blitz (2020), their styles clicked. 

Unless you go crate digging through the shadowy tunnels of accessible but still fairly underground rap, it might be easy for you to conclude that Jadasea is an Earl and MIKE disciple. But listening to him describe the timeline of their linkups, seeing his own release patterns, and hearing all of their music from the early 2020s, it feels much more like the influence was omnidirectional. "Earl and Wiki influenced me a lot... then MIKE came along like five years later, but he'd been tapped into me and all of them, really influencing all of us backwards... and then forward as well,” he says.

In 2020, Jadasea and MIKE tested their synergy by hitting the road together. “I pulled that tour together just off my email. I was fronting the money, booking the hotels and my boy was driving,” he tells me. “Now we have tour managers and booking agents and the venues are definitely sold out."

The packed shows are nominal evidence of a level-up, but the money generated isn’t as important as the people that fill up the spaces. “Music for me is like a hobby that I've ended up doing most days while I’m still able to,” he says.

Twelve years into his career, Jadasea feels allergic to self-myth or linear narratives about rap stardom, even if he notes the symbolism of the changing circumstances. “Being part of the ecosystem is what's been the most rewarding thing for me. You do something at one point in time, and then, like, 10 years later, you see what it affected,” he says.

“Now all of us are getting to be — not elder statesmen—but we're on our way,” he says. “Or whatever.”

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