Lucy Bedroque
PhilaMoCA
531 N 12th St.
Philadelphia
May 8, 2026
Sometimes getting to the gig feels downright anthropological. As I hope I made clear in the PinkPantheress review, I don’t feel at all like I qualify for Oldhead Status yet. In my view, I’m securely in Big Bro Territory and won’t even reach Unc Level for another six or seven years, and that itself depends on how I carry myself. I don’t feel like the world has passed me by under any circumstances — just that there is a lot of work now that isn’t made with me in mind and that there is a lot of art being made based on the influence and mutation of cultures and paradigms that no longer exist as they once did.
If you told me when I was 13 that the marriage of rap music and anime would become a globally equalizing pop culture phenomenon, I wouldn’t have believed it at all. If you told me ten years ago that in a decade Migos would be rendered nearly meaningless by Takeoff’s death, but Playboi Carti would be one of the most influential artists in rap, well, I wouldn’t have believed that either. Ten years ago, Playboi Carti was still an extremely hyped artist, but it seemed like everyone, including him, was waiting for something. At this time he was doing features with literally everyone you could think of, but he had still yet to drop a breakout mixtape.
Gucci Mane - Peepin Feat. 21 Savage & CashCarti (Prod. C4)
Well anyway, we see now how things have transpired. But what I have not seen, or really had any reason to see, is the manifestation of Playboi Carti's influence. Lucy Bedroque and Kuru — who played PhilaMoCA last week — are two artists who, maybe without respect to whatever subgenre of personal classification they assign themselves, seem to have come out of a movement called digicore, which itself is a sub-classification of emo rap. Trying to (w)rap my mind around the idea of emo rap having subgenres is stressing me the fuck out as someone whose first heartbreak was soundtracked by Fuck You, Lucy. This obviously sounds nothing like that, and in a lot of ways, lanes within this music don't even really sound like Playboi Carti, either.
This kind of music, to me, seems like a response to trap music and hyperpop the same way that grindcore was a response to punk and metal born of, pays tribute to, will perform alongside, but simultaneously is not. Obviously, the influence of Swedish collective Drain Gang is tantamount to the influence that Playboi Carti, and furthermore 100GECS, have on this genre, though their presences and interests have yet to converge. Regardless, this style is selling a shitload of tickets. From what I was told, Bedroque’s show at the 200 capacity PhilaMoCA sold out in less than a half hour, and upon his return to Philly, the show will likely need to be at Union Transfer or The Electric Factory. (I’m not referring to that venue by any other name, sorry.)
When Kuru slipped through the audience, it was like a bomb went off as soon as he was onstage. Wasting no time with unnecessary introductions, Kuru did like three songs back to back. The production in Kuru’s songs is extremely dense, even if the instrumentation is just a few layers of synth or samples, and live can be overwhelmed by huge blown out drums and vocals. I love overwhelming production and live performance — it was just difficult for me sometimes to understand what I was hearing as an uninitiated listener. It’s also not lost on me that these artists value lo-fi music and love to play with the accessibility it has granted their brands of rap, and in many ways I find that very honorable.
kuru - Pray for... (official video)
The vocals followed my personally hated trend of live voice sat atop vocal backing tracks. A million people have already voiced every angle of why this trend sucks so I don’t feel the need to add to it, and it’s not stopping shit anyway. I will say that I’ve yet to hear an argument that sufficiently supports it, and it often just feels like a default style for performers who either lack confidence, don’t know any better, or both. Regardless, everyone else in the crowd knew what they were hearing, and most songs were sung word for word by what sounded like 30 percent of the audience. The rest of the crowd defaulted to chanting “Hey!” over their favorite parts.
Something fascinating about this show is that the audience is just as interesting as the artists themselves, if not more. Multi-cultured and multi-gendered, seemingly every kind of person made up the audience of this show, and everyone got along. Armed security was hired for this show, and it turned out to be completely unnecessary. I can’t pinpoint what the crossover appeal is here, but it does seem like this particular Gen Z audience is overall much less concerned with the politics of identity and how they relate to this music and its culture, despite how the beef between related artists Jane Remover and Skaiwater has trickled into the lives of both Kuru and Lucy Bedroque. I don’t see the growing irrelevance of identity as a necessarily bad thing either; that shit was a liberal failure and never freed anyone. Additionally, I could say something about my lifelong struggle with white Marylanders and their blaccents and how that relates to Kuru, a Maryland artist, but honestly this piece is going to be long enough.
9Lives, who is Lucy Bedroque’s DJ, held down a half-hour set that served as a preamble to Lucy’s performance. It seemed like it was a pretty standard set for this crowd, with lots of audience participation, singalongs, and phones out. I did happen to notice the 15-second phenomenon that has been happening to artists with younger, more chronically online fanbases. Most of these songs, I didn’t know at all. I’d argue that the same might be true for a lot of the audience. I could legit tell what the most popular parts of each song was on TikTok because the singalongs would die almost immediately, sometimes midway through a sentence, oftentimes giving way to more “Hey!” chants. The set was still lit though.
If it was like a bomb going off for Kuru’s set, Lucy’s was a nuke. It’s clear Lucy is something very special to their fans; people looked on in awe as they jumped ceaselessly from one side of the stage to the other, like they couldn’t believe they were in the presence of such greatness. Watching moments like these with no context is important to me; they remind me how much music is out there and how much there always is to learn. By the time Lucy was about a quarter of the way through their set, the stage and floor were completely soaked in sweat, and it would remain that way until the last attendees had left.
Live, Lucy’s music is more ragey, with blown-out, overdriven, and sometimes bitcrushed drums that invoked the level of mosh that I thought I was going to see during Kuru’s set, but on record it simply can’t be reduced to this. Many criticisms I have of Kuru’s performance, however, I also have of Lucy’s (the vocal backing track reliance, the density of the production and its live mixing, or lack-thereof). There’s much more emotional and musical variance to be picked out, but it does still come across as slightly one-dimensional. Over time, as these artists age and grow, I expect they will adapt these styles to more expansive projects. By then, they will likely already be huge stars. By the time of this piece’s release, Lucy will have already performed at Rolling Loud in Orlando, one of the biggest rap music festivals in the world.
Lucy Bedroque LIVE @ Rolling Loud Orlando 2026 [FULL SET]
