Cult hero, chaos merchant, squat party conductor. Deijuvhs — that’s pronounced ‘dayj-yoo vee-aitch-ess’ — is the leader of a raging new underground movement of punks, rappers, nerds, and ravers getting its kicks from kicking out at the world. Having cut his teeth churning up moshpits at DIY festivals, and honing his songwriting chops through frenzied studio sessions, there’s a whirlwind now forming around Deijuvhs. And he’s in control of it.

An MC, singer, bandleader, scene leader — perhaps most of all, ringleader — Deijuvhs picks from a post-internet grab bag of unmoored musical influences. Over a series of blistering mixtapes (Forever Hoodpunk , Flower Ghoul, and Perpetual States of Boredom the following year) his catalogue leaps from grunge to sweetboi dancehall to hair metal solos. In some cases, as on 2020’s ‘Infinity Pipe’, he covers all this ground in the confines of a single song.

Growing up in Leyton, north-east London, Deijuvhs’s musical diet was split between the R&B his mum would play around the house, the snatches of breakbeat and gurgling bassline his junglist dad would impart, and the kohl-eyed metal and emo bands beaming out of Kerrang! TV. He got his first guitar at 15 and would clang about with friends and bandmates in basements and front rooms, producing their own noisy Y2K takes on scuzzy acts like Nirvana, Sonic Youth, and Wavves. The punk codes they were channelling — of DIY spaces and gang chant vocals — made things make sense. Deijuvhs has been carving out his own channels ever since. “I’m a hoodpunk,” he says, “which is something I made up for myself. My sound encapsulates so much, I can’t put it in a box. So I had to come up with something that had some sort of relevance to me.”

With no obvious scene to slot in to, Deijuvhs shaped his own. He started underground festival LameFest, and then, with Ben Spence, one of his original teenage bandmates, set up HoodStock in 2020: a music festival-cum-youth fundraising drive that provides cash, studio time, and support for young people shaping, like Deijuvhs, communities and cultures of their own.