There’s a certain kind of artist that I keep coming back to lately: artists who seem to know exactly what I want to hear before I do. Not algorithmically, but instinctively. Their music feels hyper-specific yet universal; familiar, but not quite verging on nostalgic.
I’ve started thinking of them as ‘internet babies’ – artists born and raised online, whose creative instincts have been shaped not by a single scene but by years of immersion in fragmented, overlapping subcultures.
What defines these creators is long-term exposure to subcultures. Years of YouTube rabbit holes, Tumblr aesthetics, game soundtracks, and online music recommendations. A cultural collage of sorts, an environment in which emo sits comfortably next to UK garage, and indie sleaze bleeds into rap. Nothing feels out of place because everything was encountered together.
There’s also a practical shift underpinning all of this. Music-making has never been more accessible. Any kid with an iPad can stumble across YouTube tutorials, free sample packs and intuitive software that can quickly turn curiosity into something more structured. While barriers to music careers still exist, the act of creating music is no longer subject to gatekeeping in the same way. More self-sufficient artists are emerging outside traditional industry pipelines, marked by a notable increase in artists from working-class backgrounds – particularly female producers – breaking through via online platforms.
All of this marks a clear break from older models of music culture. Scenes were once tied to geography and gatekept by labels, with genres functioning as boundaries rather than starting points. For internet-native artists, taste is no longer shaped linearly, but accumulated and in flux.
Jim Legxacy – a student of everything, bound by nothing
Jim Legxacy is one of the clearest examples of this shift in the UK right now. The Lewisham artist, of Nigerian heritage, makes music that on paper shouldn’t cohere, with rap, emo, Afrobeats, indie, R&B, even folk elements all pulling in different directions. And yet, on his genre-fluid album Black British Music (2025), it comes together in a kind of effortless logic.
You can hear echoes of Britpop and indie alongside more contemporary rap and club influences. The album’s title – often shortened to BBM – nods not just to Black British identity, but to the BlackBerry Messenger era that defined a specific kind of 2000s UK youth culture. It’s nostalgia, but not in a heavy-handed way; it’s embedded in his sound and aesthetics, but never allowed to define them.
What makes the MOBO-winning artist’s work land is not just the range of influences, but the way they’re carefully stitched together. UK rap, especially in its underground iterations, can sometimes risk collapsing into its own conventions; a kind of anti-mainstream becoming a new ‘box’ itself. Legxacy sidesteps that entirely. His music feels raw and unpredictable, yet intentional. It reflects a broader shift away from scene-based identity towards something more fluid.
PinkPantheress – the algorithm made human
If Jim Legxacy represents the collage, PinkPantheress represents the algorithm. Her rise was inseparable from the internet: posting snippets on TikTok and SoundCloud while still at university, initially without even showing her face.
Her music pulls from a wide range of influences: emo’s emotional directness (seen in artists like My Chemical Romance and Paramore), K-pop’s polish and melodic precision, and the rhythmic backbone of UK garage and drum & bass, all filtered through a distinctly British pop lens. The result is deceptively simple – short, hook-driven songs that feel immediate and endlessly replayable, built from a complex set of references.
Her songs feel designed for how we now consume music: in fragments, on loop, through clips and snippets – a natural extension of growing up with a musical and cultural landscape that’s constantly reshaping itself.
At the same time, PinkPantheress is acutely aware of the downsides of this hyper-online existence. In ‘Internet baby (interlude)’, she gestures towards the dissonance of being both shaped by and exposed through the internet, a tension that sits quietly beneath much of her work. Still, her impact on modern British music is undeniable. We see her breaking through to international audiences, with a recent showstopping performance at Coachella, and being the first woman to win Producer of the Year at the BRITs. She feels like a frontrunner in any conversation about defining stars of the 2020s.
Natanya – genre as a palette, not a boundary
Natanya offers a slightly different angle on the same phenomenon. She was classically trained in piano from a young age, with clear jazz influences, but also draws from Amy Winehouse, Aaliyah and even Vocaloid artists. However, her work doesn’t sit neatly within any one lineage. It moves between neo-soul, R&B, indie, even touches of grunge, without ever fully settling.
On Feline’s Return (2025), that fluidity becomes the point. The project feels ambitious and deliberately uncontained, drawing from both formal training and eclectic, internet-driven listening habits that define her generation. Her songs refuse to resolve into a single identity.
What’s striking about Natanya is that she doesn’t just draw from different subcultures – she moves between them so seamlessly that they begin to lose their boundaries altogether. In an interview with Exeposé, she said: “I think in worlds. Instead of genre, I’d rather imagine I’m somewhere”. When listening to Natanya, you are transported to the scene that she sets with her diaristic lyrics and unique sound.
From everything we’ve ever clicked on
Taken together, artists like Jim Legxacy, PinkPantheress and Natanya point towards something broader. Their work is defined by how it processes influence, reassembling fragments of culture shaped by years of online immersion. What emerges isn’t just collage, but music that feels both widely legible and unexpectedly personal.
There’s a common criticism that the collapse of traditional ‘scenes’ have flattened music into a set of aesthetic blends, with styles endlessly recycled. But what these internet-native artists are doing isn’t simply repackaging the past – it reflects a different mode of cultural consumption, where broadly ranging influences are accumulated, reworked and made intuitive.
To me, this generation has a distinct creative instinct. Their music is rooted in shared cultural memory but not limited by it. With the right level of craft and imagination, it becomes generation-defining.
It makes me think about how I listen, not just what I’m listening to. I’ve grown up on everything from FIFA soundtracks to Paramore to K-pop – a constant stream of sounds that never really resolved into one identity, but gradually moulded my taste through constant exposure. Maybe that’s why this music feels so familiar. It reflects that same way of consuming culture: scattered, overlapping, always in motion. I’m hearing it not just as a listener, but as a fellow internet baby.
