The Underground Is Local Again: 10 Artists Running 2026, From EsDeeKid to Bby Kell

For most of this decade, underground rap sounded like it came from nowhere in particular. It lived on Discord servers and SoundCloud pages and traveled as leaks, and it still does: Dazed recently counted 980,000 monthly listeners on fakemink archive, a Spotify profile of leaks and deleted songs that’s likely run by the artist himself (more on the burner-account boom).

But the most exciting names of 2026 are claiming real ground. Pigeons & Planes places Atlanta’s newest wave at “what may be the tail-end of the rage revolution”; Thirteendegrees has a #NEWCHICAGO scene forming behind him; EsDeeKid is closing a 48-date tour with two nights in Liverpool. These are 10 artists running the underground this year, picked for what they released, booked and broke in 2026, and for the places they’re putting back on the map.

EsDeeKid, Liverpool

Nobody outside his circle knows EsDeeKid’s name, face or age. He performs in a balaclava, and Dazed argues that what fans didn’t know about him powered his rise as much as what they did. The music did the rest: his 2025 mixtape Rebel reached No. 8 in the U.K., and Timothée Chalamet jumped on a remix of “4 Raws” last December. This fall he’s on the 48-date Council House Rat Tour, with Rico Ace supporting the whole run. The North American leg ends Oct. 27 in Raleigh, the tour closes with two hometown shows in Liverpool on Dec. 10 and 11, and next June he plays Primavera Sound in Barcelona.

EsDeeKid, “RockWave”EsDeeKid · Watch on YouTube ↗

fakemink, London

Last summer Drake brought him out at Wireless in London; this year the UK underground’s breakout star went global. Born in Ilford and raised in Basildon, Essex, the cloud rapper walked Gucci’s Milan runway in February alongside Nettspend, made his Coachella debut in April and released his debut album, Terrified., in May. By March, Dazed reported, Spotify’s data had his global listenership up 3,830% year over year, with the U.S. now his biggest audience. The singles have kept coming since the album: “Love Of The Game 3 .” on Sept. 4 and “One 2 Many .” on Sept. 25. (The floating full stops are his.)

One 2 Many .fakeminkListen on Apple Music

xaviersobased, New York

Rolling Stone called the Upper West Side native the rapper “poised to carry the mantle for New York,” and his January debut album, Xavier, made the case: 21 tracks of jerk-rooted chaos, full of beat switches, pitch shifts and sudden left turns, with production from Skrillex, Zaytoven and Dylan Brady. He came up through the collectives 1c34 and Surf Gang, opened Ken Carson’s fall Xperimenting Tour and dropped “Off Tha Meter” on Oct. 1. His music rewards what online circles call “trained ears,” and he knows not everyone has them. “It is just like, if you know, you know,” he said.

xaviersobased, “Off Tha Meter”xaviersobased · Watch on YouTube ↗

slayr, Philadelphia

In a scene that runs on looking unbothered, slayr is proudly earnest. The North Philly rapper learned to make music by talking to people on Discord, and he builds songs like video-game levels, cutting from trap to Eurodance to metal whenever a track risks dragging; Sonic’s Crush 40 and Final Fantasy are core influences. His November 2025 album, Half Blood, went viral and landed him a major-label deal, XXL named him to its 2026 Freshman Class, and the AVANT NOVA EP (July) and “remember them days” (Sept. 25) have followed. He has no time for the scene’s aura discourse. “Why am I silencing myself just to look cool for a bunch of kids online?” he asked The FADER.

slayr, “remember them days” (official video)slayr · Watch on YouTube ↗

Thirteendegrees, Chicago

Chicago has its drill and its conscious rap; Pigeons & Planes credits Thirteendegrees with leading the left-field “grey area” in between. A former college basketball player from the South Side, he started rapping after his hoop dreams ended, because nobody at home sounded like the new underground. “Around 2022, there wasn’t nobody you could compare to Yeat or Destroy Lonely from Chicago,” he told P&P. “Da Problem Solva” went viral on TikTok in early 2025 and set off a bidding war that Island Records won, and his August album, GHETTO HIPSTER, slows the tempos for something more introspective, much of it produced by Amsterdam’s Gyant. The scene forming around him already has a hashtag: #NEWCHICAGO.

Thirteendegrees, “WHITE SOX CAPZ”thirteendegreesVEVO · Watch on YouTube ↗

Destroy Lonely, Atlanta

Plenty of the artists on this list came up on the sound Destroy Lonely helped build at Opium, and he knows it. “I could literally see my influence painted all over them,” he told XXL in February. “That’s not bad. I love it.” October is busy: he rejoins $uicideboy$’ Grey Day Tour on Tuesday (Oct. 13), with a hometown stop at Atlanta’s Lakewood Amphitheater on Oct. 16, and Complex reported this week that 00Twinz, his long-awaited joint album with Ken Carson, is “set to drop this month.” No official date has been announced, and his own next album, Drop Dead Gorgeous, doesn’t have one yet either.

Destroy Lonely, “MONSTER” (official video)Destroy Lonely · Watch on YouTube ↗

Bby Kell, Atlanta

The newest name here, and the one Pigeons & Planes just made the case for (read our profile). Rahkell Badie grew up in Stone Mountain, on Atlanta’s East Side, did nails for rappers like Sk8star before picking up a mic herself, and only got serious about rap in September 2025. Her June project, GIRLY POP, sets a raspy, laid-back flow over blown-out, bass-heavy plugg. Lucki has posted about her, calling her “princess of the universe,” and Karrahbooo brought her out at Rolling Loud Orlando this year. She hears an East Side sound with something missing: “I’m tryna put some girly shit on it because I feel like it hasn’t been girl-ified.”

GIRLY POPBby KellListen on Apple Music

OsamaSon, Goose Creek, S.C.

OsamaSon’s first Australian tour was booked to open at Melbourne’s Festival Hall on Saturday (Oct. 10), a year to the day after psykotic came out, with Sydney and Brisbane to follow through Oct. 14. Raised between Columbus, Ohio, and Goose Creek, S.C., where an uncle who made Geechee music taught him FL Studio, he turned distorted, bass-maxed rage into a cult following that now reaches Balenciaga, which cast him in its summer campaign. Even his rollouts are built for the leak era: per Hypebeast, psykotic’s advance went out only on burned CDs. Next is Nocturnal, which he told GQ will run “like 26 songs,” and Nettspend has teased a joint project called NXO. On the luxury co-signs, he told GQ: “We used to be customers, specifically customers, and that’s it. Now it’s these folks showing us love.”

OsamaSon, “off that!” (official video)OsamaSon · Watch on YouTube ↗

Lucy Bedroque, Los Angeles

Bronx-born and LA-raised, Lucy Bedroque was one of the loudest voices in digicore’s comeback, and c, out Sept. 18, turns everything up. Pitchfork heard “a cross between a fashionable rave and a final boss battle,” built with producers including ginseng, kuru and ivvys, and noted a new distribution deal with Atlantic. One track, “STONE IN FOCUS,” flips a cut from Aphex Twin’s Selected Ambient Works Volume II, cleared by Richard D. James himself. The tour that opened in Dublin on Sept. 27 is working through the U.K. and Ireland this month, with North America in November and December. The last tape was called Unmusique, as in “not music,” and genre lines still don’t apply.

Lucy Bedroque, “SSJ2” (official video)lucybedroque · Watch on YouTube ↗

2hollis, Los Angeles

Nobody in the underground plays the mystery game better, or explains it more clearly. “I don’t think mystery is being dark or not interacting. That’s not mystery,” he told i-D in September. “I think you can be totally seen and very mysterious, too.” He teased his next album for most of a year on a side Instagram before announcing it: Pirouette, out Nov. 11 on Interscope, with a hand-drawn cover by the Final Fantasy illustrator Yoshitaka Amano and three songs already out in “Hurt,” “Sex” and “Warhorse.” Three days after release, he’s on the bill at Camp Flog Gnaw in Los Angeles. Here’s everything we know about Pirouette.

2hollis, “Hurt” (official video)2HOLLISVEVO · Watch on YouTube ↗

Also on our radar

Nettspend, who linked with Che on “KickAss (Pull Up Pls)” in September; Che, back on Sept. 25 with “RichPhønks” alongside Tezzus; Rico Ace, opening for EsDeeKid all tour; Feng, whose Summer at Camp Lakepine EP arrived in August; and Nine Vicious, who put out two SoundCloud EPs on the same day last month.