This story appears in i-D 376, “The Lore Issue.” Get your copy of the print magazine here.
photography AIDAN ZAMIRI
styling JUSTSHAVEDMYHEAD
poem ESDEEKID
“Vermin”
They called us dogs
as if hunger were a flaw,
as if loyalty were something to look down on.
They called us rats,
meaning scavengers,
meaning things that live where they refuse to look.
They called us vermin,
to make themselves feel clean
while standing on ground built by other hands.
History will not remember the hands that pointed.
It will remember what endured the fires and kept on walking.
Who is EsDeeKid?
Kieran Press-Reynolds sets the scene for the Scouse rapper’s entrée into the mainstream.
In 1966, at the peak of their perch atop the monoculture, John Lennon almost capsized The Beatles’ American tour by telling a newspaper that his group was “more popular than Jesus.” Sixty years later, another Liverpudlian is on pace to conquer the mainstream, commanding gale-force moshpits while clasping a sword and uttering larger-than-life flexes. “I’m the hardest out of the century!” he roars. “I’m the male version of ecstasy!”
A year ago, EsDeeKid had only a fleck of a fan base, and before that, only a handful of songs. He’s blown up so shockingly fast that he’s managed to hit 20 million monthly listeners on Spotify without any intel on his personal life leaking. We don’t know his name, his age, or what his face looks like behind the signature balaclava and long hair. He’s never even done an interview, not even for this cover story. All we know is where he reps and what he raps.
If there were a Kalshi prediction market—God forbid—for the next UK rap prince in early 2025, EsDeeKid would’ve had very long odds. More likely picks: Lancey Foux, a dreamy rage pioneer who collaborated with Yeat and hung out with Ye, or Fimiguerrero, the Nigeria-born Londoner who tore up TikTok with jerk snares and Gucci burgers. Above all, there was Fakemink, the tastefully zooted 21-year-old chilling with Frank Ocean and Drake. But somehow the “council estate rat” from 200 miles north of London blew past them all, with just one album.
Rebel, released last June, is simple on the surface: a Scouser with a bone to pick, tearing through beats as gloomy and ominous as an English sky, with tight rhythms and loops courtesy of British producer Wraith9. When asked why they fuck with him, fans can’t proffer anything besides “the accent!” They can’t get enough of his Merseyside croak, the way he turns words like “party” into a tumble of phlegm and his timbre makes “Actavis” conjure up someSkyrim warrior. He stretches out the word “Malibu” like his tongue is skipping over jump rope. Every time he says “manic,” “traffic,” “back it” on “Panic,” it sounds like he’s baring vampire fangs. The Liverpool accent, which melds Irish and Welsh pronunciations, is already speedy and slurred, and EsDeeKid makes the most of this by locking into pneumatic, throttling beats. When he careens into “Phantom”—with the line, “blacked out like a phantom”—his crumpled delivery seems to spark like steel striking flint.
Rebel offers a snipped origin story without ever slowing the pace. It’s a tale about a fatherless, self-described “scumbag” raised in Liverpool slums, a kid so broke in Year 10 that he was forced to catfish “as a bitch” to make money. Now he’s rolling ’round the motorways in a spenny Benz, always wearing that bally (balaclava), and smoking “top crop.” His songs scatter-spray local lingo and British slang that baffle foreigners, especially because most of the annotations on his Genius lyric pages are either AI or gibberish. In his music, EsDee’s always being chased by the plod (cops); he’s hanging at the gaff (house); his Scouse ting’s rolling up the jabba (joint). He’s managing his ascent like Jürgen Klopp, the former manager of Liverpool Football Club. He’s saying fuck Briscotti (weed strain) and fuck Montirex (clothing brand the locals are obsessed with). He references Everton blue, calls to free inmates at specific UK jails, and declares that he’s Paul McCartney. While Rae Sremmurd’s Slim Jxmmi could only pretend that “me and Paul McCartney related” on “Black Beatles” (which EsDeeKid remixed, one of the first songs he ever dropped on SoundCloud), EsDeeKid can claim the same ancestral land.
EsDee clearly wants to rep his Liverpool origins, repeatedly big-upping a place that often gets shunted behind London and Manchester when people talk about British musical genius. The city has a long legacy of homegrown grime, trap, and drill that includes Lily Allen diss tracks, a petrol bombing incident, and numerous regional faves like HAZEY and Aystar. You can hear traces of EsDee’s flow in MC Tremz’s breathless spatter of threats and dramatic sentence accents. The unanointed might accuse EsDee of ripping off alien rap demigod Yeat with the balaclava, but his attire is attuned to a place once home to a rapper named Bally Jones.
Liverpool MCs have infested TikTok in the past; Mazza L20 and Aystar’s deadly “Murdaside – ScouseMix” soundtracked almost 60,000 videos on the back of regional pride (and outsiders obsessed with the accent). “I asked him where he’s from, he’s not a Scouser, he said, ‘Waterloo,’” Aystar taunts, referring to the salubrious suburb of Merseyside. While EsDee is basically the leading, if not only, Liverpudlian rapper known outside the UK right now, the MC Young LS has said that he reckons there are over 1,000 local artists.
While the accent and allusions anchor him in his hometown, EsDee’s dissonantly cosmic rap feels more like a product of the hybridising global safari of the online underground. A forensic study of his X posts and SoundCloud likes reveals an internet rap nerd. Instead of local legends from Toxteth, his listening history brims with Lil Tracy, Lil Peep, and dreamy outsiders like Yabujin and Drain Gang. (His second tweet ever: “Yoo chill i’m just a vessel ! didnt mean to flex on u bro Im just a vessel.”) Now and then, there’s something from his side of the Atlantic, like the 2008 up-tempo dance tape Wigan Pier Presents Bounce. (“Wigan Pier” refers to the area surrounding the canal that threads Leeds and Liverpool. Wigan in general, including its very popular Nightspot club, has been a centre of dance music since the 1970s, if not earlier.) For the most part, it’s internet shit: The dark grey Black Kray and Lil Yachty tread heater “Killa Killa” changed his life back in the day. He posts fondly about the time he spends admiring unreleased cloud rap songs from between 2011 and 2014.
EsDee’s X account functions something like an auto-Ask Me Anything, littered with gems. He talks about how a shrooms trip on a Malibu beach last year broke his mind open, and claims his style inspos are the video game Assassin’s Creed and Ryuk, a terrifying supernatural demon from Death Note. He urges the world to “bring back the dab,” says Shooters is his favourite film, and swears that when he gets rich, he’s going to buy zoos and release the poor captives. His X account also offers a revealing glance into how he’s dealing with increasing fame in real time. In January last year, he was a nobody tweeting out links to Yung Lean and Ballout’s cloud rap classic “Wanna Smoke.” Then he dropped the shivery “LV Sandals” with Fakemink and Rico Ace, which quickly became a hit. Just months later, he met up with Yung Lean himself. His posts have become both increasingly grateful and deliriously hungry. He has repeatedly written that the Earth contains 8 billion people and that he’s on a quest to conquer them all. EsDee has consistently shouted out a little-known alt-pop artist he calls the best musician of this generation—a guy named Chanel LSD, presumably one of his day-ones.
Rebel hit the Billboard 200 for the first time in November. This was just weeks after the Great Rumour: that EsDeeKid was Timothée Chalamet. While other theories spread (that he was the footballer Curtis Jones; that his former alias was Dualspines), this idea from the TikToker @gothauntie0 really took hold. Diehards dissected the minutiae of EsDee and Timothée’s eyebrow structure and tracked their locations. Chalamet stoked the flames when he ominously told iHeartRadio that “all will be revealed in due time.” Rebel continued to climb; the sickly, snotty “Phantom” surpassed “LV Sandals.” Everything climaxed in late December, when the two smashed the rumour by dropping a remix of “4 Raws” ahead of Timmy’s Marty Supreme release. “It’s Himothée Chalamet chillin’,” the actor spat while juddering next to EsDee in a kitchen. “I’m havin’ fun, just sextin’ / My dick is young and restless.” In January, Rebel became the longest-charting UK rap album in Billboard 200 history. Rap news accounts are spreading a rumour that EsDee signed a $30 million deal with Capitol.
The regional freshness and the myth ended up being the perfect storm needed to produce a new rap star. Secrets are the only thing left in our always-on social media panopticon. It’s why the biggest new artists are either ultra-enigmatic, stoking intrigue by offering zero biographical information, or overly exposed, revealing their embarrassing guts instead of aura farming. It’s why there’s a premium on raw house parties and newsletters that report on exclusive party gossip. EsDeeKid’s concealed features call back to the giddy thrill of early-YouTube face reveals, when you didn’t immediately know everything about your idol from a quick Google AI summary. His music offers the tease of someone who obviously has a huge personality—this snarled Scouse accent ripping through serrated beats—refusing to give the ravenous crowd the deep parasocial access they crave outside of his recordings. I hope he never reveals his face and never gives an interview. Keep us tantalised in the dark.
set design SAMUEL OVERS AT NEW SCHOOL REPRESENTS
movement director JOE GREY ADAMS
photography assistants ALEX SOROKA & RYAN JAMES
styling assistant UJ
set design assistant HARRY HAWKSWORTH
production OBJECT & ANIMAL
producer ELE BALDWIN
production assistant RONAN NGUYEN
post production AIDAN ZAMIRI
location ALVA STUDIOS EAST
