Jeshi Tickets

Jeshi is part of Ticketmaster New Music’s Breakthrough 2024 list – our pick of the hottest new artists you must see live in 2024

Jesse Greenway doesn’t fear being demonised. In fact, it’s the demonisation of Britain’s working class that drives his lyricism, built on blistering social commentary and injustice.

Growing up in the East London borough of Walthamstow – where Stop and Search was all too familiar – Jeshi admits to not remembering an era before the Conservative Party’s austerity measures. Living with little sense of opportunity and direction, Jeshi found his path paved with drug use and knife crime at the age of just 11. 

Jeshi made a choice to alter his self-destructive trajectory. Choosing not to retaliate after being physically assaulted in front of his family as a teenager proved to be a pivotal moment. Music became his focus and free recording technology helped him to create his own grime tracks, though his tastes soon expanded . Absorbing influences from the likes of Massive Attack, Radiohead, Pink Floyd, Toro y Moi, Amy Winehouse and The Streets set Jeshi apart from his peers, resulting in his chaotic, lo-fi debut EP Pussy Palace in 2016. After collaborations with BRITs Rising Star Celeste and super producer Mura Masa, the combustible rapper honed his synaptic aggression in 2020 with BAD TASTE.

“I hate the term conscious rap”, Jeshi said in a recent interview. The perspective of his lyrics aren’t strenuously over-thought, they’re born out of lived experience and out of his anger towards the powers that let hopelessness eat away at his community. 

The result of his plain and palpable dismay is the visceral Universal Credit. Jeshi’s 2022 debut album on Because Music Ltd lambasts the policy of the same name and its fallout. Exploring the social ills that have directly impacted his life – knife violence, austerity, social media-induced mental illness – tracks like ‘Another Cigarette’ and ‘Killing Me Slowly’ depict the necessity to turn to booze and drugs to cope, with a candid (and hazy) humour. 

Frustration is Jeshi's ever-presemt, blurting out lines like “used to tear my room apart playing Limp Bizkit” on ‘National Lottery’. But it’s currently the cost of living crisis that's in his crosshairs: “Keep leaving lights on / Electric bill getting bad / Seeing my nan / Train to Southend / Picking cigarettes out the sand,” he spits with disdain on ‘Hit By A Train’.

Jeshi’s unfiltered political nature might deter some from embracing him, but the compelling story-telling of his lived experience is difficult to refuse, an explosive anger that feels timely and invigorating.