Jeshi confronts his own façade with new single “Mask On”

Jeshi has been making waves for a little while now but it all started to really kick off for the Walthamstow native last year. Having spent 2019 touring with slowthai and working with Celeste on her wonderfully moody single “Summer”, Jeshi finally gave fans a full EP’s worth of material earlier this year with his Bad Taste EP.

New single “Mask On” continues that same refreshingly loose stylistic journey - Jeshi pulling listeners in with his dulcet voice and keeping them there with those smooth and slow cyclical grooves. “Mask On” is a melting pot of grime and glitchy electronics but with an eye very much on rough-hewn pop melodies - something Jeshi attributes to his desire to unite everyone from the nans who just want to listen to Marvin Gaye, to the 13-year-olds who binge-watch Link Up TV.

“It’s about balancing the world I was in when I was a teenager,” explains Jeshi. “Hanging out on an estate all day, seeing loads of fucked up shit, and now, sitting at home watching Wes Anderson movies. These worlds never mix, which is a shame.” Beyond uniting the disparate musical tribes of London and beyond, Jeshi’s news single (rather aptly) explores the masks we all wear and how to shake them off.

“I wrote ‘Mask On’ working with Pablo sometime last year,” he continues. “It deals with the metaphorical masks we all wear whether that’s just a fake smile, or the material things like the nice house, car or jewellery we use to shield whatever it is you’ve got going on inside from outsiders.

“I grew up feeling like I could never be vulnerable, I’ve still got a lot of that to shake off - I’m still walking around in the mask too."