Jawnino: Freedom of Movement

Wandsworth-raised rapper and producer Jawnino has already broken free of the suffocating constraints of faith and the anxiety of estate life – now he’s cutting loose of musical boundaries to become a pathfinder for UK Ug.

“I used to have this dish every week growing up,” Jawnino says, flashing a wistful smile from beneath the black hood covering his head. “There was a spot called Mirch Masala in Tooting. They did the best matar paneer. This was my every Saturday thing,” the enigmatic MC continues, before anointing a piece of naan with rich gravy and taking a bite.

We’re on the other side of the water from Jawnino’s home borough of Wandsworth, in Whitechapel, east London, having lunch at Lahore Kebab House. Beginning life in 1972 as a hole-in-the-wall with a chalkboard menu, it’s been a staple of the local community ever since. A pair of elderly uncles sit next to us, nattering quietly in Urdu between mouthfuls of rice and meat. A cricket match unfolds in respectful silence on a wall-mounted television screen. In the far corner of the canteen-style dining room, a cabal of finance bros in crisp white shirts cackle loudly at jokes nobody else is in on. 

Jawnino is UK rap’s anonymous ghost in the machine, chronicling the ket- and pills-fuelled escapades of working-class Gen Z Londoners in a grey, rain-streaked metropolis. His conversational, stop-start verses unfurl across nocturnal beats that seamlessly merge everything from grime and dreampop to synthwave and jungle. More recently, on December’s SURF GANG-produced EP Amnesia, he’s drifted towards cloud rap, trap and plugg. He’s blessed, too, with an eye for granular, gritty, distinctly British detail. “Bring me a fix/ Got enough spare for a chicken and chips/ Half pint, maybe a Twix,” he muses on his 2019 breakout It’s Cold Out, over a production that plants Eskibeat drum patterns in a bed of warped, blue synths that are as chilly as the other side of the pillow.

In this bold new age of Ug (underground) rap – where anonymity, minimal social media presence and boundless genre-splicing are the default – Jawnino is a key pathfinder. He’s always been a digital recluse, using inventive ways to obscure his image in music videos and live performances. While the scattered musical references of his contemporaries can border on the pastiche, his sonic experiments feel rooted in a nerdishly cool knowledge of sounds from Britain and beyond. And beneath the hedonism of his work lie lucid, existential observations – fleeting moments of clarity glimpsed through the lenses of his bug-eyed shades.

“This is where I first met Theo [3o], my main producer. He used to live in an abandoned hospital at the end of this road,” Jawnino tells me between sips of mango lassi, explaining the area’s significance. “He had a studio there, which used to be the room where they tested babies’ hearing. It was a crazy spot.” His taste for working with forward-thinking producers – the likes of Cold, Oliver Twist, Poundshoppe and brbko, who stitch together sounds like mad scientists in moonlit labs – began with 3o in that disused audiology room. The video for 2023’s 2trains was shot round the corner, beneath the hazy streetlights of Commercial Road and in the shadows of the nearby railway arches. Over brbko’s spacious, psychedelic soundscape, Jawnino’s voice sounds so distant on the chorus it could’ve been sent via voice note from another galaxy.

Jawnino was raised on Roehampton’s Alton estate – a brutalist-inspired behemoth and one of the UK’s largest public housing estates, with blocks pointing towards the sky like massive fingers. “I used to get the 265 to and from school,” he reminisces. “Everyone from Roehampton used to get that same bus, so you’d figure out where everyone lived. I’d go to different blocks and chill, knock for people and kick ball. They’re some of my purest memories of the place.” But he also remembers the inner-city pressure: the local gangs that affected school life, the constant need to watch his back and the very real prospect of being robbed when he stepped outside his front door. “I think in Roehampton there’s this feeling of being left out from the rest of the city,” he reflects. “The people who live there are fighting to make it out. Music has been a way of showing that there’s a bad side to life here, but there’s also a beautiful side. And that we’ve made it out. That’s what the 4040 – Good Thing Bad Thing Who Knows – EP was about.”

The four-track EP – executive produced by Oliver Twist and released in June 2022 – offered a quick tour of Jawnino’s world-in-progress, the scaffolding of the universe he was building in his head. “We’re here for a better time, we ain’t here to better time,” he declares like a south-west London Epicurus over a radiant synthline, before reeling off cryptic descriptions of local violence and questioning “the meaning of man” on opening track, Can’t Be. While on closer Dance, he skewers gentrification over a glitchy tech-house beat. 

His highly anticipated full-length debut, simply titled 40, landed in May 2024, revealing Jawnino’s inner world in full and fully realised colour. The project features an extended mix of It’s Cold Out, the raucous, drill-adjacent Westfield and transcendent dreampop on standout Wind. “When you rose the blade I couldn’t move/ I wanted to lose,” he confesses, over a production that feels so delicate it might disintegrate like cigarette ash on the breeze. “To be able to say that on such a different vibe – like, I’m not talking about doing it, I’m talking about the other side of it,” he reflects. “That was the beauty of being able to let out on those kinds of beats. That’s how I got out of the state of mind of being in Roehampton. Like, I’d finally found what I’d been waiting for: these ethereal beats with open space and beautiful strings that I could speak my mind over. It felt like home.”

At its core, the 40 tape is a hopeful portrait of London set against the backdrop of ‘broken Britain’, painted when the dance is done, the buzz is gentler, and the sky glows pink and purple as the sun rises. Jawnino is in no doubt about what needs fixing on our cold island. “Obviously, there was never freedom,” he says, as a caveat. “But I think there used to be an energy of freedom here. I feel like you can’t do as much as before. We lost a lot of good spots, a lot of good parties. The internet is a beautiful place, but the experience of going to clubs and parties and actually meeting people was healthier. I think it’s the things we’ve lost that make it feel broken. Like North Greenwich, where I live now, is very serene. They’re trying to build a community, but the community is not really there. I think about what was here before, a lot of the time.”

By his own admission, Jawnino spent a significant period of his adolescence indoors. “I had friends, but the way I was raised meant I couldn’t spend too much time with them when I was younger,” he admits. “So I spent a lot of time in my own head. I think that drove a lot of things.” Running laps around the playground of his mind, soundtracked by his dad’s extensive music collection – which put him onto everything from Scritti Politti and The Smiths to Wiley, courtesy of a Tunnel Vision tape squirrelled away like a rare Pokémon on an old hard drive – Jawnino began to clandestinely write his own bars. “I don’t think my dad even knew that tape was there,” he quips, laughing. “But that was my pathway into grime. And grime eventually became the focal point of everything for a while.” 

He progressed from sketching rough 16-bar verses on his phone and sending them into Logan Sama’s KISS FM show, to night-bus odysseys to Empire Radio in deep north London with close collaborator JP (a.k.a. babydoom). “We pulled up and there was a fruit machine in the corner and like ten guys on the mic,” he remembers, animatedly. “I was a bit nervous because I’d done the spitting thing before, but not on a set. It went off, though!” From there, he went on to ride a “post-grime” wave alongside JP and other avant-garde MCs like Kibo and Renz.

Weekends, though, were reserved for church. Jawnino loved playing football but never experienced the rite of passage of playing Saturday or Sunday league with his pals. “My parents wouldn’t let me play for a club,” he says flatly. “We used to knock on people’s doors on Saturday mornings and go to church on Sundays. The whole weekend was locked off.” He had to content himself with kickabouts with his “church guys”, but you get the sense that didn’t quite cut it. Adhering to religious dogma meant that, technically, Jawnino couldn’t make music either. It’s an experience he alludes to on upcoming single Mattress – a murky collaboration with New York City rapper and producer deer park – on which he juxtaposes the hedonistic luxury of being in “Armani button-up suits, doing CK”, with the stark image of “handing out the mics, washing off sins” in church. “I’m showing the actual bullshit I was going through when I was younger,” he explains. “I wasn’t allowed to make music. That song is my way of finally laying it all out.”

Throughout our conversation, Jawnino is calm and collected, mirroring his unhurried presence on the mic; but when we talk about faith, it feels like an unburdening of the soul is taking place at our table. “I grew up with this whole idea of… ‘This is your purpose, this is what you need to do to make God happy,’” he explains, sitting back in his chair. “I almost never believed in that, even though I was there [in church] the whole time. Now I think we view life way deeper than it actually is. We’re so insignificant in relation to the size of the whole universe, bro. And the idea of the 40 plays into this whole thing of nothing really being that deep. Like this,” he continues, gesturing with his hands at the space around us, our shared reality for the afternoon, “is just 40 bits of everything.”

The ‘40’ refers to the concept that, while the human brain receives approximately 11 million bits of information per second from our senses, the conscious mind can only process 40 of them. Jawnino read about it in a behavioural science book, and has run with the theory ever since, making it a recurring motif in his music. “It just made me feel more present,” he admits. “We’re very insignificant as beings, so it doesn’t really matter what anyone else thinks. It’s helped me be free with music and express myself even more. The sounds I use are not the usual sounds you’d hear in a grime or rap or trap song. It’s given me freedom.”