Jeshi sets October 26 for the club-minded mixtape Headrush

Jeshi will release Headrush on October 26, a ten-track mixtape built around club music rather than adjacent to it, out through Select Discs and Partisan Records.

The rapper has framed the project around a specific memory. Travelling from Walthamstow out to Essex clubs as a teenager felt like being teleported into another world, he said, and the over-the-topness of the rooms was exciting to his 17-year-old brain. What he keeps returning to is that nobody had to know the right records or belong to the right scene to be there.

He has also been direct about the gap he is trying to close. Dance music has always been one of his biggest inspirations, he said, but he felt like an outsider to it, DJing at friends' parties without a way of putting his own songs into those rooms. Headrush is his attempt to write the kind of song he can play out immediately.

The guest list is drawn from both sides of that divide. "peace at last" opens the tape with Ineffekt; "champagne" features Fredwave and Big Ever; "make me sane" brings in Just Lil; the title track features X CLUB.; and "before u" closes with Oscar Farrell. The lead single "linea rossa" pairs him with the London producer Cameo Blush.

That last collaboration follows a run of others. Jeshi and Oscar Farrell recently shared the single Greyhound and set up a Peckham party around it, part of an eighteen-month stretch of work with dance producers.

Headrush lands on the release calendar for late October, sitting between hip-hop and electronic music rather than choosing one.