Baltimore, MD · experimental-rap · industrial-hip-hop

JPEGMAFIA

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Self-produced noise-rap made on a laptop — abrasive, funny, and unrepeatable live, every set a controlled demolition of its own material.

JPEGMAFIA is Barrington Hendricks, born in Flatbush, Brooklyn in 1989 to Jamaican parents. He moved to Alabama at 13, where he experienced racism that later fed into his music, then finished high school in Louisiana. At 18 he enlisted in the US Air Force, serving during the Iraq War and spending time in Kuwait, Germany, Japan and North Africa before being honorably discharged after reporting abuse by his superiors.

While stationed in Okinawa and Tokyo he began producing under the name Devon Hendryx, releasing mixtapes such as Dreamcast Summer Songs and JoeChillWorld. After settling in Baltimore in 2015 he adopted the JPEGMafia name; early releases including Communist Slow Jams and Darkskin Manson, the latter shaped by the Freddie Gray protests, circulated in the city's noise and experimental scenes before his independent debut album, Black Ben Carson, in 2016.

He produces his own material, using distorted samples, sudden structural breaks and vocals that shift between rapping, singing and shouting, drawing as much from noise and industrial music as from rap.

Veteran, released in 2018, brought wider attention, and was followed by All My Heroes Are Cornballs, which reached the Billboard 200, and LP!, his first release after signing to Republic. In 2023 he made Scaring the Hoes with Danny Brown through AWAL, then released I Lay Down My Life for You in 2024.

Live, he generally performs alone with a laptop, reworking and interrupting his own songs as he goes, treating each recorded version as a starting point rather than a fixed script.

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experimental-rapindustrial-hip-hop