Mugun is treading the path of most resistance

This is the sentiment that Coventry-born Mugun has captured on his latest EP, Dissident Behaviour, and an ethos that he has gradually become more comfortable with growing into.

When the now 27-year-old rapper released his debut Walking Street in 2023, he was still trying to figure out where he fit — searching for a sense of belonging within the music scene that he was breaking into.

“When you look at me, you can tell straight away that I’m not exactly the same as every other rapper,” Mugun says. He’s referring to his cyberpunk-inspired personal style, which sees him regularly adorning all black — his nails sometimes painted to match — complemented by stacks of silver hardware jewellery. “Fashion has always made half of my aesthetic,” he tells me, “And I’m not going to hold back on that.” He values his visual identity as an extension of his creativity, but acknowledges that his more “alternative” presentation made him feel conspicuous, to the extent that people thought that he modelled. This led Mugun to focus on the music more, understanding how he could incorporate his aesthetic into his sound.

At the same time, this came with a desire just to blend in with his counterparts as Mugun began to tread unfamiliar terrain. “In the sense of music, I wanted to fit in with what everybody else was making, and that was the case with Walking Street,” he explains. “I’ve always had the ability to wander too far to the left, and I felt that it would estrange me from the music scene.” Now, with Dissident Behaviour, things are different. Mugun is following his own internal compass, leaning to the left, and shedding the pressure to conform that influenced him at the start.

“This time around, I feel like music is so oversaturated that there is no point in me holding back on how I feel,” Mugun says with a settled confidence. “I should just be throwing out the feelings that I want to put out there. So Dissident Behaviour is just me, without any holding back.” It’s a statement said simply, and it’s a call back to how Mugun first discovered that rap could be used cathartically. Or as he puts it, a way to “throw his feelings out there”.

For Mugun, music found him as a means of expressing frustration that arose from his inability to truly articulate his emotional experiences growing up. “I started rapping out of frustration,” he tells me. He laughs as he continues, “I can honestly say that it was because of a break-up when I was a kid. I had no way to say what I wanted to say for it to make sense, so I started writing random bars.”

Even as the young Mugun learned how to vocalise his feelings through these spontaneous compositions, he played it safe. His words fell out in private, contained in his own space. “I used to sit in my wardrobe like a chair, and I’d just be spitting,” he notes. Once he found his flow, it couldn’t remain tucked away as wardrobe freestyles. While being hidden wasn’t his intention, it was the support of a friend that really gave him the nudge to take those early verses further. “My bredren literally looked at me and said, ‘You’re hard, you know. I don’t know why you’re not doing this anywhere else!’”

Mugun tells me that he went from rapping in his wardrobe to rapping at bus stops. Soon, he caught the attention of one of his bosses at work, who had a link with JDZmedia — the video production company known for platforming emerging and established talent within the UK grime and hip-hop scenes — and was keen for Mugun to be seen by them. However, his trajectory wasn’t set. He found himself stopping and starting, the pull between his growing tastes and what would be deemed as commercially acceptable, meaning his musical path was less decisive.

“By that time, I was already listening to crazy music,” Mugun reflects. “I listened to grime, but that was a younger version of myself. Between thirteen and fifteen, those were the days when rap music and grime were everything to me. But later, I started to listen to a lot more 90s rap. I was listening to Lauryn Hill, and I just kept diving down rabbit holes with artists like Erykah Badu. I’d stopped music a couple of times since then, and when I really decided to take music seriously, I had all of these musical legends in my head. I was thinking that I can’t really touch any instrumental and not try it out.”

Years later, Mugun is trying things out; honouring the spirit of the kid didn’t feel a need to hold back once he learned how to let loose. Dissident Behaviour marks the moment that he stopped apologising for doing so. Almost entirely self-produced, the sound of the new EP melds hardcore grit, rave DNA, and patois absorbed during his adolescence spent in Jamaica. After being kicked out of school during year eight, Mugun was sent to the island and faced with learning a new system, making new friends, and discovering a culture that “has always respected creativity.”

He returned to England for year eleven, but Jamaica became his creative laboratory, a place he’d return to at seventeen, eighteen and nineteen, each time returning to the UK feeling “fully charged.” “I realised that the material I’d come back with after being in Jamaica would be completely different,” he explains. “I think Jamaica definitely taught me how to focus on working on something with real depth. I was seeing stuff in a different light. It makes you come back to places like England or America and know exactly what you’re here for, what your targets are. It makes you think about whether you really want to pursue them, and how you’re going to go about it.”

Having carried that drive since adolescence, Mugun exercises a levelheaded control over his creative process. “If I finish the instrumental and I’m still not feeling it, I’ll probably scrap it and start again,” he admits. “I’ll be writing as I’m making the beat at the same time, so I can progressively make the instrumental fit my bars exactly how I want them to go.” Everything from scenic noise to background layers gets added early, because he knows exactly how he wants each song to unfold. When it’s right, it happens quickly. When it’s not, he starts over.

This perfectionism stems from Mugun's own high standards. He doesn’t find himself struggling with comparisons against his UK contemporaries; rather, he measures the quality of his work against the expectations of legends. “I do not see them as competition,” he clarifies, speaking of current British and American artists. “I only look at the greats. I wonder how they would hear this and think about my music and what they’d get from it.” It’s a standard that could be intimidating and in some ways paralysing, but for Mugun, there’s a sense of liberation. Seeking to measure up to the work of the greats is a reminder to continue pursuing his own vision, rather than pushing himself to compete within an oversaturated field.

“I’m always trying to make a sound that’s not new to me, but new to other people,” Mugun explains. While he derives inspiration from Fatboy Slim, Ludacris, and Rob Dougan’s “Clubbed to Death” from The Matrix — all influences that hold familiarity for him — he’s interested in distilling them, understanding how they can work together within one narrative. If he can’t find a space for his sound to fit, he’ll create one — using instrumental textures for continuity. “I’ll look at the scene around me,” he says of that process. “So, if we’re in this Y2K era, for example, where do I fit myself in it? I might take one half of Fatboy Slim and one half of Ludacris, match them together, and find my cool spot.”

It’s here that Mugun demonstrates how he goes about using that sense of feeling like an outsider to his advantage. He transforms it into a sonic universe that feeds into maximalism and feels like something of a nod to the future of what UK rap can challenge itself to look like. While the EP’s instrumental landscape is diverse, with opener “Journey” driven by the shimmery polish of an Afrobeat-inspired electric guitar melody interwoven with distant police sirens, “She Wah Move” fusing a double bass rhythm with junglist percussion, and “Calm Down” set against an alt-rock backdrop, it’s Mugun’s vigorous flow that keeps things consistent, and it’s aligned with one intention.

“I was just looking for euphoria,” Mugun explains of his creative motivation. “I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s what I look for in music — these specific kinds of simple, layered synth build-ups that give you that feeling of thinking about a house party when you were seventeen. Where you’d think about it before you went, envisioning all of these possibilities about how it’s going to be. That was literally the feeling I would get from certain songs. I want to give that back.”

Mugun’s euphoria seems to push against the emphasis on documenting harsh realities while projecting hardened personas that prevails within the UK rap space. Mugun isn’t interested in that performance. “The narrative of a lot of music right now is talking about people’s surroundings,” he says. “Everybody has that right now. There must be a more creative way for you to make me feel how you’re feeling. I feel like every rapper now, especially rappers from any kind of ends, are trying to numb who they really are to portray this character. But I feel like the person that you’re trying to hide is the cool person. That’s the person with all of the answers.”

This is not to suggest that Mugun’s story has been without hardship. His older sister has served as a guiding light throughout his journey, as someone who shaped not just his musical taste but his entire approach to self-expression. As a toddler, while their mother worked night shifts as a nurse. “She put me onto a lot of 90s music,” he says. “That’s literally half of the influence of everything, even down to the way I dress, to painting my nails. She fully understood me all the time. She was one of my biggest fans.”

The tragedy that colours Dissident Behaviour is that she never got to hear the completed work, the fruit of her influence. Mugun had finished most of the EP before briefly travelling to Italy, only to have all his equipment stolen. When he returned home, it was to attend his sister’s funeral. On a newly purchased laptop, in the raw aftermath of grief, he made “Resentment”, the first thing he made on the new laptop — and the closing track of the EP. “What’s weird about a lot of the EP is that it all sounds like I’m trying to get out this truth and connect everybody,” he reflects. “But I did all of that, and I couldn’t even figure out how I felt just weeks before my sister passed. And then I made ‘Resentment’, and it was one of the hardest tracks to make. I wasn’t cutting any corners. I was upset, and I was very vocal about it.”

Inadvertently, the EP served as a tribute to her golden era — when she was in her early twenties, going out, living fully and experiencing the euphoria that Mugun now channels into his music. “This was a project that was mostly based on that,” he says. “And it’s not gonna stop. Even what I’m making now, it’s not the same, but it has the same kind of emotion and feel. I knew I didn’t feel great on the inside when I was making Dissident Behaviour, even before everything happened. But I still wanted to keep it in the essence of where people could go out and enjoy it, and really connect with it.”

Lead single “Searching For Truth” addresses the dichotomy of personal grief and communal euphoria with Mugun’s expressions of inner-city loneliness paired with vibrant, slightly reckless soundscapes. The contradiction is intentional. “There are a lot of people who feel the same way that you do, but won’t express it,” Mugun says. “There’s a depressing undertone going on. People aren’t talking as much as they used to. I wanted ‘Searching For Truth’ to tell people that they’re not alone in the way that they feel. If you’re feeling low, you'd probably look at your mate and think they’re doing great, but they could be feeling exactly the same.”

Looking at the current UK scene, he sees both opportunity and stagnation. “Everybody sounds the same, and I’m sick of hearing everybody sound the same,” he says. ”I want to show that I can be completely different, but you can still like me. I wanna be able to switch on the TV and see artists like Usher, Ludacris, Nelly and Lil Jon,” he says, referencing the intrigue and diversity of early 2000s hip-hop. “The colours of music then were perfect. That’s what I want now. It’s what I’m fighting for.”

Thinking about Coventry, Mugun describes a city where conformity feels particularly suffocating, but breaking the mould requires active resistance. “If you were to come down and chill with me, there’d be about fourteen guys in a Tech Fleece, and then me and my one friend dressed the way that dress,” he laughs. “That’s what it was like for us growing up. It kind of drifted us apart. People would wait until certain rappers dressed a certain way for them to feel like it was okay to do the same. Now, everybody who is around me literally fights for their individuality. You have to fight to be yourself.”

The running theme of Mugun looking for a space to be himself informs the Dissident Behaviour universe entirely. “I always, as a kid, felt like I belonged to a group of strange individuals,” Mugun reflects. “I always said that one day, I’ll find them. And I have — my group of friends have all of the same childhood traits as me, but we weren’t necessarily all together as children. Dissident Behaviour is supposed to be adolescence, recklessness. It’s supposed to make people say, ‘Fuck it, I’m going out and getting active.’”

At the same time, he hopes that listeners will connect with the vulnerability underneath the bravado. “I’m not afraid to have these conversations with my friends now,” he says, at ease with the ability to maintain that transparency with the people who are closest to him — while also tapping into a willingness to extend that to a wider audience. “It’s easy to see that everybody is actually scared. I’m wondering, what’s in the water? Why does everybody seem to feel the same way right now?”

There’s no immediate answer, but perhaps Dissident Behaviour is the first step at trying to understand. When asked what he’d say to artists still searching for their voice despite fearing vulnerability, Mugun’s answer is quick and direct: “Never hold back. Nobody’s for everybody. There is always somebody who understands you. Just never hold back in being authentically yourself. It’s the coolest person anybody can ever be.”

He pauses, then adds: “You almost have to fight for it. Especially now, you have to fight to be able to be yourself. I feel like everybody should fight for their individuality. Everybody should be themselves.” It’s honest, earnest guidance from an artist who has spent years being the odd one out. But through Dissident Behaviour, it’s clear that Mugun has found beauty and belonging within the margins.