A few Guinnesses into an interview in his local Irish boozer, and 26-year-old Harrow rapper Kibo is cooking. As a kid, he preferred playing Fifa Street – where ordinary players backflip off walls to score incomprehensible bicycle kicks – to regular realistic Fifa. He’s drawn to similarly miraculous footballers: Balotelli, Drogba in his Chelsea days, Ronaldinho and his dad’s favourite, Eric Cantona: “Oh God, with his collar popped, looking like Kanye West?” Kibo then recites Cantona’s 2019 Uefa president’s award speech – a mash-up of King Lear and philosophical musings on war and science – to near perfection.
Magic is at the heart of Kwelengletarianism, “the idea of being in a place that’s very grey, and trying to find a prismatic iridescence in it”, that underpins Kibo’s sensational album Kwengletaria: Ragamyff. (Cantona? Kwengletaria finds the myth in the mundane: on the track Bakerloo Dragon, a normal tube journey becomes a cruising broken-beat roller aboard a fire-spitting Bakerloo line train. I tell him my train to Harrow was one of these flame-graffitied dragons.
I ask him who he’s watching. Kibo is 6ft 4in tall, possessing Irish heritage, a goatee, a mane of hair straight from a fantasy film, and a sackful of devastatingly rude bars: “I’ll take your mum Butlin’s / And I ain’t fucking bluffing / You’re not a bad boy, you’re an Egg McMuffin.” You’d back him to win a match on aura alone. Add in references to anime, Pokémon, chicken shops and X-wing fighters, combine it with 16 producers making beats spanning garage, R&B, donk, grime and jungle, and you get a sense of Kwengletaria: Ragamyff’s scale.
The all-you-can-eat impulse comes from growing up online – “I was a kid with a million tabs open, trying to speak with a level of eloquence” – and the Kwelengletarianism concept stems from when Kibo’s schoolmates began trading pirated Yu-Gi-Oh! cards. It’s the first thing I remember in my life where I was looking at something and knowing it was valuable.” Kibo nods to his grime forebears on the album, sampling from Dizzee Rascal’s Boy in da Corner on closer Our War Game. He shouts out Fiona Templeton, an academic at Brunel University (where he got a first in film, drama and media) for giving him a word for what he was doing: hyperdiction.
These collisions – of genres, references and words – create a new meta-language of smashed together non sequiturs in his work, such as “Courvoir-Sierra Leone”, or “Dimitar Burberrytov”. They’re also stamina-boosting power-ups. On Chancer, the album’s midpoint mellow grime flexer, Kibo’s criss-cross patterns unfold over three beat switches and five relentless verses.
On Bakerloo Dragon, Kibo says he gets the “charm from ma, and the swag from dad”. Eileen of Limerick fell swiftly in love with John, a drummer from Harrow, when he was over in Ireland for a holiday. They navigated a two-year long-distance relationship before she moved to England.
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