Minutes after Liverpool FC confirmed their 20th top division league title, the club posted a commemorative video on their YouTube channel. As well as showing England’s most successful football team in all its glory, the video painted a homely picture of the city for its international audience. Shots of famed Merseyside landmarks are interspersed with images of a united community, of greengrocers, pub landlords, terraced houses and a long history of working class prosperity. A city full of hope, passion and loyalty.
“Look, I’m a scouser and Liverpool’s the hometown / the right price, your little kids will get you blown down,” threatens Croxteth rapper B_Real.11 on the first line of his song “Hometown”. He is just one of a new wave of rappers from some of Liverpool’s most impoverished boroughs – predominantly Toxteth, Croxteth and Bootle – that have been flooding YouTube freestyle platforms such as Daily Duppy, Fire In the Booth and P110 over the past year. Together, they paint a much grittier picture than what is advertised by Liverpool FC, but one that is still brimming with pride among the city’s working class youth.
Leading this charge are the likes of Mazza L20, Young LS, Kasst 8, Vinny and EsDeeKid, who are attracting international attention for their distinctive, breathy, spit-pinging rap delivery. At once aggressive and casual, the Scouse accent moves in slow and fast waves. Rappers expel Ts like an open hi-hat, Ks with the sound of necks snapping. Similarly, these rappers flatten the outmoded notion that UK rap all sounds the same.
The scene is at an exciting crossroads where there is potential to go in any sonic direction. Rappers are sharing their stories over high-energy drill and grime, through-the-bone horrorcore, Jersey club-indebted sexy drill, as well as the outer reaches of the UK’s new jerk movement. And many more are running down the wings, according to Young LS, one of the scene’s biggest names. “If you asked someone outside Liverpool how many rappers they think there are, they probably think 10 or 20,” he says over Zoom, masked up. “I reckon there’s about a thousand more.”
The major turning point came in 2022, when then-19-year-old HAZEY’s “Packs and Potions” became a charting hit through TikTok virality, arguably because of his accent and abundant football references. The next year, Mazza L20 ushered in a lyrically gruesome take on drill to the city: his track “Murdaside” propelled him to fame in part because of the circumstances behind its release. Recorded and dropped while serving a nine-and-a-half-year prison sentence for possession of a firearm, bullets, and two counts of wounding with intent, “Murdaside” reached #18 in the charts and spawned a slew of remixes. “I’ve never heard your name, you probably heard of mine,” Mazza raps, assured in his own infamy. Falling into crime is a recurring theme in these rappers’ stories: Liverpool has historically suffered from gang culture, weapons trafficking and high levels of poverty (the city’s crime rate is 55 per cent higher than the average in the UK).
Recent scouse rap success has led to rappers from outside the city tapping them to remix successful singles, in what has been dubbed ‘the scousemix’. So far, the most successful of these is the “Southside” remix of Salford rapper Jordan McCann’s “Northside”, which brings together Vinny, B_real.11, The Mole, Brisc0151 and more into six breathless minutes. With other regions receiving similar treatments (see Birmingham’s ‘Brum Mix’), this trend shows rap’s ability to draw out shared street-level experiences across the UK’s disparate regions, while also celebrating their distinct accents and cultural history.
Since the 1980s, Liverpudlians have had an “uneasy relationship” with national newspapers and their representation in the media. Young LS notes how scousers are loved but also “very hated”, with Kasst 8 adding: “People are very judgemental in this world. Especially with the accent, people will take the mickey out of the accent, but they don’t know scousers on a one-to-one level. They look at stuff in the papers and on the news and believe it.” The increasing popularity of “scouse rappers” could do well to undo that image issue. Local gangs and their tragic impact are still a part of these areas of Liverpool today, but these ‘scousemixes’ evidence an even greater unity between these rappers. “Even with the Young LS collab, because he’s near Croxteth, I’m in Toxteth, it’s good to show unity in the city,” says Kasst 8. That’s what Liverpool rap scene offers: a glimpse into a different angle of the city, but united all the same.
Raised in the industrial docklands of Bootle, Mazza L20 has gained the most attention for how his creative violence borders on horrorcore, rapping the gruesome details of past altercations like a campfire storyteller. Growing up with three offender brothers, he witnessed his house raided from an early age (“traumatised, definition of a sick mind,” he opens up on “Free A1”), and that has informed a deadly seriousness in his tone. There’s an unnerving absence of comedy when he raps a line like, “I’ll bring you to your mum’s like I’m tryna do the post” that has glints of Marshall Mathers. Eminem himself is a fan, as is Central Cee, who brought him out during his tour stop at Manchester’s Co-Op Arena. Perhaps what most likens him to Mr. Mathers is how he’s also able to interrogate himself with the same brutality, such as on his viral Fire In the Booth in which he berates himself from the perspective of his girlfriend while he was behind bars.
Kasst 8 grew up a lyrical prodigy. At 14, he was featured on Charlie Sloth’s Radio 1Xtra documentary It’s Grime Up North. He wrote his first lyric aged 10, and when he wasn’t listening to his mum’s mix of dancehall, reggae and Fela Kuti, he was absorbing the wisdom of his older cousin who was part of a local Toxteth grime crew. “I was tapped into what everyone was doing in grime from 2002 – Lord of the Mics, Risky Roadz, I’ve got loads of Sidewinder tapes I took from my older brother when I was a kid,” he lists.
Carrying the flows developed on those early tapes and DVDs, Kasst’s granular storytelling puts you in his retinas. You may be so transfixed by the consistent flow of his recent Kenny Allstar Freestyle that it may escape your notice that he explains in great detail how his cellmate fixed his broken phone charger with only melted plastic and a matchstick. Elsewhere in the freestyle, he displays his extensive wordplay, like the five-line run of NBA roster-likening that would make you think the eight in his name is his shirt number, not his postcode: “I coulda been playing ball like Rodman, but I had punters belling me out and I told them I don’t sell ticks like Boston.”
Kasst 8 first caught attention for his “Scouse Backslang Freestyle”, which explains how he utilises a local coded language akin to Pig Latin to avoid police detection. “It’s been a part of our dialect for generations, and there’s different variations depending on what part of the country you’re from,” he explains, recounting that he learned it around year seven from his mum, aunties and uncles who used it to mask what they were saying from the kids. “I was about 17 or 18 when I had to use it myself in certain situations, and then it just became a part of my dialect.”
In a crime-heavy scene, Young LS’ biggest sin is a biblical one: lust. Raised in Croxteth Park Estate, described by LS (standing for Lil Shotta) as “surrounded by bad areas, but not one of the rougher parts”, he raps with an almost cartoonish salaciousness. His hooks are often a barrage of two-syllable body features he likes in dizzying fashion, one that appeals to the attention span-sapped TikTok generation. If scousers are known for their cheekiness, LS embodies that, currently riding high on his biggest hit yet, “Cocky Little Kid” which went number 1 on the Spotify viral daily charts in Australia the same week that Liverpool FC won the Premier League. “The reason why is because people think it’s [scouse UFC fighter] Paddy ‘the Baddy’ Pimblett rapping on it,” he says matter-of-factly.
LS’ first song was spurred on by a need to pay tribute to his dead brother. “We was highly into rap, not specifically UK rap, just rap in general. We had a big friendship group and all of our mates were into other genres, whereas me and me brother was into strong American rap,” he says. He presents a sonic US influence in his music, in the Mustard-style West Coast bounce of “Little Blonde” to the especially muddy take on Neptunes’ cling-clang minimalism on “Scouser”. Many scouse rappers share a similar love for American rap from the 90s and 00s, and LS offers one explanation for this. “Me and me mum used to listen to Tupac every day,” he reminisces. “He had music for everyone, and I loved his whole personality and his way of going about life. He didn’t give a fuck, but he had respect for people. He’d say certain things that were so relatable, and I feel that’s the same for a lot of people in Liverpool.”
Another rapper born from prison catharsis, Kirkby MC Vinny’s crime of choice in his bars is burglary. By the sounds of it, he could have your place emptied by the time you come back from the offie. “You’re downstairs in your living room, dancing / three of my mates [up] cause we’re mole-ing in your mansion,” he surveys the robbery on his “#1Take” freestyle. He operates on drill with a decathlete’s stamina, but has also rapped over “Snow (Hey Oh)” from Red Hot Chilli Peppers. “5 On a Box” combines with Young LS’ sound for a Jersey Club mix of whirring, angular bass revs, club organs and a crowd of vocal cycles fighting for attention. A beat that encapsulates the soundscape of Liverpool.
The stylistic outlier in the Liverpool scene, EsDeeKid has the same US rap influence but looking squarely at its contemporary cutting-edge: blown-out jerk and hardcore trap with a Memphis-like darkness and a fried digital business on par with Broadcast’s Tender Buttons. Self-proclaimed to be from Mordor, his new album Rebel positions him as the sort of all-encompassing icon for hellionism that Lancey Foux has been for the UK. He’s a miscreant, a fashion maven, an alt-girl womaniser; in his words, a stoner, a warlord, a stockpiler. He dirtbikes through a series of explosions on the hooky “LV Sandals” with fakemink and Rico Ace, while tunes like “4 Raws” and “Ferragamo” could fit snugly on Playboi Carti’s Music.
He makes frequent references to nerd and emo culture, tucking Lord of the Rings, Deftones, Despicable Me and $uicideboy$ into his lines. Whether he’s barking at the beat or slouching back, he uses every harsh quality of the accent to his advantage. “I’m a burden, I’m a scumbag / I was raised in Liverpool’s slums, lad,” he spits out on “4 Raws”. From the way he delivers it, you can tell he wouldn’t have it any other way.