“Mark Zuckerberg is my number one person I would like to donate some Kwengletarianism to,” Kibo declares, chuckling over Zoom. “I saw him do one interview where he was talking about sometimes he drinks coffee recreationally, and I was just like, ‘Oh, someone needs to get this guy a packet of pickled onion Monster Munch, a four-pack of Red Stripe, and let him listen to Max B’s greatest hits, and watch The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy.’”

The London MC’s self-devised mythology has come to define a lot of the chatter around him. It’s not a religion or a cult, but a way of making sense of the world, growing out of him slowly figuring out which things gave him a sense of inspiration and fantasy. His mates would call him Kwengletaire, and over time he began building a mythology around that feeling, eventually giving it a name: Kwengletarianism.

It’s not cropped up out of nowhere though, as Kibo started building towards this ideology with 2022’s ‘FBFR4: Fuego Baby Furtardo Returns (Sorry 4 Da Longness)’ mixtape, a turbo-charged rap project that eventually disappeared from streaming services after a copyright dispute involving fellow rapper YT. From then onward, he kept making music without necessarily feeling the need to release it, while booking raves to pay his bills, and eventually ending up with a catalogue of music he felt best represented his ‘origin story’ and that of Kwengletarianism, as it became more apparent to him.

At its core, he explains, the philosophy is about taking the life you already have and making it feel extraordinary. Growing up in Harrow, at the end of the Bakerloo line in north west London, Kibo looked beyond his surroundings for inspiration. With his fondness for the films of Mamoru Hosoda (The Girl Who Leapt Through Time, Summer Wars), he filtered fantastical influences through an unglamorous reality to create his own sense of utopia. It’s something anyone can adopt to add a sense of magic to their surroundings. “Everyone can have their own Kwengletaria,” he says.

Kibo is just as charismatic and quick-witted in person as he is on record, and you can sense his mind whirring like an overheated laptop as he speaks. He says it feels like 100 tabs open at once, and that the internet permeates everything he does creatively. However, that density means people don’t always catch what’s serious underneath the jokes.

He worries, for example, that lines like his comic-referencing bar on the Iglooghost-produced ‘PXG’ (“I’ve gotta make Scott Pilgrim choices / Link with flowers or link with knives”) might be read as an aesthetic flex, rather than what he describes as ‘recanonising’ old references into something with real depth. Nevertheless, his wordplay and heady, dance-heavy beats make him one of the most exciting additions to London’s rap scene. He describes his latest album, ‘Kwengletaria: Ragamyff’, as grime-adjacent rather than a straight example of the genre. “Some people think it’s a grime project, some people think it’s a rap project. It can be whatever anyone wants it to be.”

The album was created with the friends who’d been in the room with him from the start, like producer HNRO, who holds the most credits on the album, alongside long-time collaborator Swurla and a group of friends he’s dubbed the HA-liens after his hometown. Novelist, meanwhile, is the record’s only feature, a very deliberate choice. “He’s my favourite grime musician,” Kibo says. “And for me, making this project, to have who I consider the greatest grime musician on it as the sole feature is a really cool thing.”

Two songs sit above the rest for him: ‘Iridescence’ and ‘Red Starz’. He frames them as sequential moments in the album’s arc: “‘Iridescence’ is like the lightning bolt moment at the end of the film, and then ‘Red Starz’ is where it all makes sense.”

“[Wrestling] means a lot to me, and it inspires me and informs a lot of what I do as a musician”

The latter came almost fully formed on a late walk home. “I was looking over the bridge and saw the red stars, and I was just like, ‘This is what [Kwengletaria] is all about,’ building your own constellation from these fake stars, because we can’t see normal stars in this smoggy city,” he explains. He then found himself pouring out the verses in his Notes app in some kind of transcendental flow state. “The words just kept coming to me.”

That sense of world-building extends beyond the music. In his visuals, Kibo turns up with a wrestling belt slung over one shoulder. Initially created for a planned tour, it’s since become part of the mythology. The belt would mark ‘the first title reign of Kibo’. “[Wrestling] means a lot to me, and it inspires me and informs a lot of what I do as a musician.” He tells aspiring rappers to study it because “if you can get over as a wrestler, you can get over as a rapper. It’s the same skill set.” For Kibo, technical ability only gets you so far; you need to create characters, build plotlines and participate in real crowd interaction.

He sees ‘Kwengletaria: Ragamyff’ as the chance to finally lay out his mythology in full. He spent years making it, approaching the project less like a collection of songs and more like cinema. “I felt like I was directing a film more than writing a project at some points,” he says. He wanted to establish the mythology first and get listeners to understand where it all comes from. That’s why he calls the album “the rock upon which everything else is built”. By laying out his mission statement as an artist, Kibo hopes the record will provide deeper context for everything that follows.

Kibo credit: Swurla

One place he will reach a new fanbase is at Reading + Leeds Festival, where he’s headlining The Canopy stage. For someone who spent his school years refusing to attend festivals unless one would actually book him, the fact that he’s now been given a stage of his own feels particularly satisfying. “I was like, I ain’t going until they book me. Fuck that shit,” he says, laughing at the stubbornness of his younger self. “I’m gassed. It’s also gonna be some of my first performances post the project being out. So I’m excited to perform the songs, see what that set list looks like, and discover how people take that in.”

He teases that there’s “always something special” when he performs. So perhaps this is the prime opportunity to finally reveal another side of his musical universe: a secret covers project featuring karaoke-style versions of songs by Ben Howard and Natasha Bedingfield, among others, which he’d accidentally revealed in a previous interview. “I didn’t even like that I forgot that one went out there,” he laughs. “I just said it, and then I read it [in the interview], and I was like, ‘Oh shit, I forgot I let that one out of the bag.’ But yes, it is real. It does exist. ‘Now! That’s What I Call Kibo’ is coming out soon – hopefully not too soon, though.”

Kibo’s ‘Kwengletaria: Ragamyff’ is out now via APLCO.

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