From Newham, London
Recommended if you like Dave, Bashy, Nemzzz
Up next Debut mixtape planned for spring

It’s a measure of how quickly Keaton Edmund, AKA Kidwild, has speed-run his way through a performing arts career that the rapper describes himself as being in the “comeback part of my life” at age 20.

As a child he was acting opposite Beverley Knight in The Bodyguard in the West End and toured the production around China. He had a main role in four seasons of CBBC football drama Jamie Johnson and appeared on Casualty. You can see him dancing in the video to Stormzy’s 2017 single Vossi Bop, a baby-faced scamp swinging a baseball bat into the camera lens. It all made him grow up fast. “I was spending bare time alone, bare time with older people. So I just started seeing life for what it is. You get time to sit with your thoughts.”

Bored during Covid, he ordered a microphone and began crafting rap songs of his own. Half a decade on, he now has millions of listeners drawn to his candid storytelling about his life’s struggles. But not until after a false start.

By 17, he had signed to major label Atlantic Records – so young that his mum had to chaperone him to the signing. But after Edmund had released two tracks, the person who signed him left, and he was left in limbo. “For everything to just go cold, you start second-guessing yourself,” he says, speaking with expansive, gentle gestures on a Guardian office sofa, his features still almost as boyish as in that Stormzy video. “It’s kind of degrading, because you’re meant to be the next star, as they said, and then you just exist.” After a third track “didn’t live up to their expectation – I don’t know what their expectation was”, he was dropped.

But that newfound freedom left him feeling “like I came out of jail”. He felt charged up at the prospect of making a career on his own. When his self-released track Indecisive started gaining traction in October 2024 – it’s since been streamed 29m times on Spotify – he was visiting family in St Lucia. “Everything I ever wanted was happening, and I’m just sitting at my grandma’s house in the village.” He flew home, then a day later he went to the studio and “in a flow state” wrote the hook to Redemption – one of the biggest British rap tracks of 2025. “How can I stop when I come this far? / I smile outside, deep down I’m scarred”, he rapped. Later in the year, on superb JBee collaboration If I Lose, he tells a lover: “I just want you to hold me.”

Vulnerability has soared in rap over the last decade, but Kidwild is particularly soul-baring over his atmospheric, drill-adjacent beats. Is it taboo for men to be so open with their emotions? “It’s true – you see it in the suicide rates in men compared to women,” he says. “A lot of men don’t open up. With songs where I’m quite vulnerable, people message me and say: I relate to this so much. If they are one of them people who don’t like to speak on their emotions, at least they have Kidwild to relate to.”

The most potent of these tracks is his recent single Forgive Me, about his relationship with his father who was imprisoned for a number of years. “I was calling your phone, never got no reception / The only pic I got of us is me in Reception,” Kidwild raps, crestfallen. “I remember the first time I got a call from jail,” he says. “I didn’t want to speak. I said hi, and that was it, just gave my mum back the phone.” On the track he spits out: “Is it a crime if I say I’m glad he got sentenced?” But after five years of no contact, they are beginning to reconcile. “When we speak about it now, I laugh because it’s like, now that I’m older, I understand life more. I see why I was angry.”

A forthcoming mixtape is “a chance to talk my truth” and chart his difficult youth. “A lot of music now, there’s not much topic, it’s just like …” Vibes? “Vibes, yeah – which is good! I like vibes music. But I wanted to add something different, get in depth.”