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Ant wants to know how many times the upcoming Roddy Ricch album will be pushed back.
A handful of cultural litmus tests exist to gauge someone’s literal or mental age: “What is your comfort TV show?”; “What are your thoughts on SNL?”; “How many Young Thug songs are in your playlist?”; “Are you a Russell, Kareem, Magic, MJ, Kobe, Bron, or Steph guy?”
But there is a rising favorite that will tell you if you’re talking to someone freshly 17 or sniffing 30, or an age that years can’t measure but weekly screen time can (being #tappedin has no age): “What are your thoughts on jerk music?”
For us approaching 30, jerk music harkens back to middle school days spent wall-flowering at Teen Night parties while kids with ROYGBIV skinny jeans, cat scratches in their eyebrows, and studded Hot Topic belts pin dropped and Spongebob’d their way into the hearts of classmates with heat damaged hair and forearms made of Silly Bandz.
The Los Angeles dance culture that evolved from gang life (think of jerkin’ as crip walking’s dorky mallrat nephew) infected schools across the nation in ’09 thanks to dueling viral breakthroughs in Audio Push’s “Teach Me How To Jerk” and The New Boyz “You’re A Jerk,” grainy flip phone footage of competitive crews The Ranger$ and UCLA Jerk Kingz, along with dance tutorials broadcasted from Youtube to 106 & Park. Jerkin’ picked up where hyphy left off, splashing coats of neon paint over the Bay’s rattling soundscapes. LA doubled down on the digitized vocal chops, rudimentary chant hooks, snaps, flirtatious vocal-fry-heavy delivery, and snare-clap lines to create rhythms perfect for rubbery limb movements.
Eventually, as all dance-propelled movements do, the labels plucked away the top dogs, kids got older, and the sound was pillaged by different corners of the country splintering into more region-specific party sounds. By late 2012, LA had ditched making music for fall formals to focus on alcohol-infused twerk anthems. Tyga, Kid Ink, and DJ Mustard were the new Gods, and the New Boyz swapped their flamboyant flannels for tailored white suits and Pitbull-type beats. Despite what Young Sam would have you believe, jerkin’ did die. For a while anyway.
From Phoenix to Milwaukee, and Alabama to New York City, rappers and producers aiming to counteract the agro drill and rage scenes that defined their early 20s have plucked the carcass of jerk music for parts, spending the last three years bringing the debaucherous party music of their elementary school years to the modern day.
Dubbed “nu-jerk,” this sonic revival isn’t exactly a one-to-one copy of LA’s whispered knee-breaking dance movement. Fashion flexes and girl-talk galore, one shot vocal samples yelling in the background, and that same boxy snare-clap combo are the defining traits of its modernized successor, but the similarities stop there. Pluck any song from the OG Jerk canon and you’ll find most were mid-paced thumpers built without melody, leaning on the punchy vocal chops or minimal fuzzed basslines to shade the blank space. Modern jerk beat makers exist in a landscape where melody overpowers all else, so it’s only fair their beats will be packed with layers of luminescent chords or pulsating synth leads, swallowing the artist alive.
Jerk’s early LA days had rappers copying Lil Wayne’s choppy slow-flow punchlines, laughing to themselves like whenever they shot a cheeky line at your girl. Now, the beats are speedy rushes of dopamine with flows that are largely slushy, negligent phasing through the meter of the beat. Nu-jerk has also lacked any cultural codification the way OG jerk had; there’s no distinct uniform, no home base city to claim it, no established dance, and the biggest creators have dismissed the sound as being “burnt out.” At least that’s what the Americans are saying.
Across the Atlantic Ocean a legion of UK artists have taken America’s hand-me-down sound and tailored it beyond its original beauty. YT, not to be confused with Ranger$ member YT, is the UK-born and bred Oxford grad who proudly dawns the nu-jerk label like a supertunica. His latest album OI! is the most refined product in the nu-jerk canon, featuring last year’s summer smash “Black & Tan” and this summer’s soon-to-be rooftop party staple, “Girls Trip.” But how did we get to the point where a Londoner has become the torchbearer for a revived LA sound?
To break out into the consciousness of casual rap fans in this hyper-fractured and major label-avoidant world, it takes a handful of micro-scenes and their respective stars banding together to legitimize any one sound. Tracing a throughline in this hyper-fractured Internet Age is maddening. Connections exist behind invite-only Discord servers, dead Soundcloud links, and personal YouTube algorithms. Who was the first person to exhume the phrase jerk? Who was the first producer to turn to this forgotten LA sound for inspiration in the studio? The story of jerk may begin back in ’09 LA, but there’s a long list of characters whose experiments in nu-jerk have survived long enough to become building blocks for the hot sound of ’25 UK rap.
Tap your finger at a steady pace. This casual thump is about the speed OG Jerk lived. Now tap it faster. A lil more c’mon. Now clap your hands at this same pace. Congratulations, you’ve just unlocked the skeleton of a Milwaukee lowend beat. Mixing Detroit street rap and the adoration of body movement LA once had, Milwaukee remains the only city in America still innovating dance moves for the love of the game rather than the algorithm, keeping some ties to the original jerk scene. Certified Trapper is the artist responsible for the sound becoming the Cream City’s go-to (and a constant inspiration for xaviersobased) but the crown jewel of the city remains AyooLii. He’s mastered the balance between Ol’ Dirty Bastard and Sada Baby; a shit talking Tasmanian Devil who can gain a head full of steam to mull you out of your designer socks before you can turn to run. The FearDorian, AyooLii, Polo Perks collab album A Dog’s Chance from last year acts as the missing link between Milwaukee’s insular scene and today’s speedy nu-jerk, boiling over with cartoon hi-jinks, left-field sample picks and more handclaps than a Baptist Church on Easter Sunday.
Once a fairly prolific YouTube and Soundcloud producer credited with helping bring the nu-jerk wave to fruition, he’s now become a ghost deleting his YouTube page and a majority of his official releases. His IG is wiped clean, without even a profile picture. Most COVID-era tracks still online with his name attached venture into nu-jerk, but where he became so infatuated with the sound is left to the imagination. For my money, it all ties back to the clap-heavy Milwaukee scene that floods fresh ACL-smashing songs by the hundreds every month, but with no solid proof we’re only left with our thoughts and dozens of kids running up views making Kashpaint-type beats.
“patchmade,” the Kashpaint-produced single from the summer of 2022, was the moment this newborn baby known as nu-jerk opened its eyes and became a fully living organism. Kashpaints contributions were spread amongst kids with nonsensical rap names and near inaudible mixing that never turned into anyone of note, while xav has shown what is required of a new-gen star.
Every artist mentioned going forward has pointed to this seminal track as the spark for the nu-jerk wildfire, and almost as many have followed him like a 5G Pied Piper from their hometowns into the knotty underground scene of NYC. Need a concert rowdy enough to get the metal detector scattered in the street? Call xavier. Want a pic for the gram that will get you posted to Hyperpop Daily? Call xav. Going on a press run across the five boroughs? Xav will roll up across the room during the interview and help you avoid getting lost on the train back to your hotel after.
Amongst his broad catalog, nu-jerk is a footnote as he’s blended DrainGang’s sleep paralysis raps with a release-first-quality-check-later mentality to create cracks in the foundation of what a rap song is. He’s the next in line to take the Internet DemiGod mantle once held by Soulja Boy, Lil B, Black Kray, Yung Lean, and Bladee. If any of those names make your greying hair stand up, xavier will be the final straw to make it fall out.
Whether he’s brain rot Post Malone or the newest “Next Up” artist to peak with a couple of cover stories to his name, Nettspend is still just a “badass kid” with nu-jerk beats in his DNA. He’s equal parts witch house, tread music, and rage rap, managing to synthesize the most alluring parts of all these worlds into 120 second bangers.
Building a friendship with xaviersobased and his 1c34 crew allowed Nettspend to align with the right innovators and tastemakers to slowly build him into the TikTok teen idol we see today. Much like xavier the go-to musical sound is unpredictable, shifting daily to whatever is the noisiest messiest thing in his hard drive. Being the lone artist of the bunch with major label backing (Virgin Music Group plucked him out in mid-2024) allows him to be positioned as The One™, gaining all the shine and criticism in exchange for his streamlined hits.
Nu-jerk anthems come so naturally for the kid (“Shine N Peace,” “Impact,” “What They Say”) he’s nearly abandoned it altogether, looking for new challenges over rattling evilgiane beats and indie pop samples. It’s only a matter of time before middle-aged talking heads band together in your algorithm ranting about the guy.
If you’re one of the lucky ones, you’ve not only gone to a YhapoJJ concert, but were able to cop a “NOT A JERK RAPPER” t-shirt from his merch booth. Despite using the sound to catapult into one of the bigger artists on this list, and by proxy bringing in swaths of new fans, Yhapo is also the most outspoken against being defined by it. Every now and again to keep longtime fans happy he’ll return to his deadpan android ways, howling like a direwolf and punching in heartbreak bars broadening the stroke of nu-jerk from swagged out confidence to reflective and longing.
The sing-songey raps of Pheonix’s Subiibabii harken back to the Zaytoven loving plugg&b scene with the swag-centric bounce that makes nu-jerk pulse with perfection. While everyone else is confident in their plain spoken half thoughts about girls, guns, and blunts, Subii’s melodic preferences are a smoother journey, opening up the pathways to what a jolt of jerk music sprinkled into some clubby electro R&B songs would sound like. I’d say that idea’s a perfect alley-oop to Charli XCX if she wanted to reheat BRAT with a new set of spices, but skaiwater and Lil Nas X already perfected it.
Our first foreigner to latch on to the jerk wave! With an affinity for the old school Instagram filters and blurry PhotoBooth pictures for cover art, Phreshboyswagg deploys nostalgia bait like a pro, giving a guideline to lure in fans chasing that wistful warmth. Though once you press play on “What I Love” or “I Failed” that fuzzy feeling quickly fades away as you’re thrown upside down and shaken for change.
The idea of someone “rapping off beat” gets thrown around a lot by fans who can’t fathom someone going outside of a 4/4 time signature (Blueface history will absolve you I promise) but Phreshboyswagg may legit suffer from beat deafness. Just out of the pocket enough to piss you off and a beat selection outlandish enough to keep you drawn in, Phreshboy takes Chief Keef’s “Citgo” as a seed and nurtures it out to a full forest of cockney skinny jeaned debauchery. It’s sloppy and mindless, yet attractive in the way finishing a big bag of Skittles is once you’ve already secured the sugar headache.
Another ghostlike figure, Fakemink has only gone through with one interview to date, speaking to NoBells about his want to spark the UK underground into making better music, fashion, and his dedication to writing down his lyrics versus the typical punch-in method of his peers. Finding an artist driven by conscious well plotted decision-making in this sub-sect of the underground is rare. Maybe that’s why Fakemink (fka 9090gate) gave himself the nickname London’s Savior, going as far as to name his cloudy 2023 tape the same title. Earnest and wordy to the point of clunkiness, Fakemink delivers a more traditionalist approach to nu-jerk, even going claiming his interest in the sound isn’t based on his peers, but rather a quest for beats that remind him of Drake’s “Headlines.” With a growing profile and co-signs from xavier and Nettspend along with laterally influential cult leaders Snow Strippers, evilgiane, Osamason, Fakemink is already within the sacred circle. Will it take him dropping the mysterious artist facade to become the next proper star from this scene, or can he drop a proper hit and remain shrouded in mystery? Get in while the stocks are low kids!
While everyone else has dismissed nu-jerk as a burnt-out fad or one of the millions of tools waiting to be picked from a tool belt, YT is pushing all his chips in on the sound. Despite multiple generations separating him from Action Figure$ or JINC Ent, YT relies on the source material more than any artist above. He’s the first to flesh out an aesthetic M.O., leaning on the fantastic retro-minded video team surrounding LAUZZA and fashion inspiration from TisaKorean, Chief Keef, and In My Mind-era Pharrell. On 2023’s #STILLSWAGGIN he kept enough madness to go toe-to-toe with the American jerk affiliates, but OI! is an exercise in reeling the chaos into a neat palatable structure. Everything feels meticulously aligned, but not bleached to sterility. There are humorous caption-ready bars, earworm refrains, and a T-Pain adjacent style of Auto-Tune that feels refreshing compared to the slick sanitized variation running the charts the last decade. The American jerk rappers en masse come off as antisocial potheads cool with kicking it inside every weekend, whereas YT is the life of the party. There’s a schoolboy giddy that radiates from his dance floor filling anthems and skirt-chasing bops alike; you can almost hear his heels click as he raps about taking girls on shopping sprees. A clear hunger for boisterous sweaty fun from rap’s new stars exists, otherwise “Black & Tan”, “Arc’teryx” and “Prada Or Celine” would never have crossed the 1Million stream threshold, and YT feels the most focused on feeding the audience exactly what they want plus some.
There’s a syndicate of nu-jerk rappers in the UK unified with an interest in the sound, which should be a bright sign for the scene. Yet, a crossroads exists. The story of nu-jerk to date has been about the hypermobility of sound in an Internet native rap landscape, but will re-centering it in the UK allow the fire to rage on, or will it be stifled out? Lancey Foux, Fimiguerro, YT, Len, and Jim Legxacy have all chugged out collaborations, moving in unison to pillage the same ‘07 to ‘13 range for aesthetic inspiration, but how far can it really go? Will YT’s purified version of jerk become the blueprint for unknowns within the UK scene to find success? Will it have a short shelf life and be memory holed by those who lived it forever like OG Jerk, or will it become the next defining regional sound to thrive for decades like Hyphy? Will everyone evolve into something different, springboarding into a new sound? Will the US rappers who’ve become bored standing at jerk’s vanguard be given a chance to reap the benefits of a wave they ushered in? Will YT have to pass the swag out to any big name that comes calling ala Cash Cobain so the casual fans can properly digest this sound reclaimed under the Union Jack (a nu-jerk Roadman Drake song would send me to an early grave), or can it happen naturally?
If you ask me, “jerkin can’t die,” and the blissful ignorance that thumps through its history will always draw in fans.
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