Rhys Langston – It Jes Grew (Right Outta Me)
When I heard Rhys Langston’s first 2025 collaboration with Open Mike Eagle, “Ate the Tuning Fork While I Taxied in the Crepuscular”, I knew this was an artist worth watching all year. When I fall for an artist’s work, supporting them becomes serious business: without their art, my head would be full of doubts, problems, and daily nonsense.
Now Langston has delivered “It Jes Grew (Right Outta Me)”, the final single before his must-buy album “Pale Black Negative” drops on June 11. At 6 minutes and 21 seconds, this shouldn’t technically be a single – but that’s exactly why it is one because Langston apparently enjoys defying conventional wisdom.
This ancestrally connected piece about hair finds Langston playing almost every single instrument, banjo, guitar, clarinet, synthesiser, and percussion in what he describes as a self-produced assemblage. Rather than following 2020s hip hop production trends, he’s channeling Henry Thomas and Fela Kuti, while linguistically drawing from Ishmael Reed and Harryette Mullen instead of today’s subdued rap stylings – basically creating music that sounds like it time-traveled from multiple eras simultaneously.
The song emerged from a casual 2021 encounter with his Minilogue synth, spiraling into what Langston admits became “frankly, a jumbled mess.” After letting it marinate for a year, he returned in 2022 to fine-tune the arrangement and gently annoy his friends into recording clips about their hair, because nothing says artistic vision quite like pestering your social circle for content.
The result explores themes of Black diasporic identity through the metaphor of hair growth, with the repetitive mantra of “it jes grew” becoming both celebration and meditation on natural processes and ancestry. This is Langston’s “kitchen sink approach” to genre deconstruction in full effect – a preview of what makes “Pale Black Negative” essential listening in 2025.
