Diabolical

Jeshi: Universal Credit

From Walthamstow to the world, Jeshi is the rapper distilling the state of the nation into “frank, sometimes bleak but often funny framings of UK city life.” After a slew of impressive EPs, this year has seen him translate his personal experiences into a raw debut album aptly named Universal Credit – at a time when the UK endures one of the worst cost-of-living crises in a generation.

For an artist that knows how to convey a message as well as he does, Jeshi’s record deserved a statement-making street campaign. Taking the DWP cheque from Universal Credit’s album cover and supersizing it onto a billboard, we constructed a giant, 3D model of Jeshi himself holding it up to accompany it on the street-side. Encapsulating both the album’s pertinence and Jeshi’s tongue-in-cheek approach to his output, the campaign proved a success on social media – while the record itself had a glowing reception in the press, from The Guardian and Pitchfork.