We began Amnesty 2025 by going back to 2005. To kick off Week 2, Jacob has us going back to 2006…
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Al Varela: Just when I thought I knew what to expect from Black British Music (2025), I’m struck with a pop-rock inspired beat with crisp drums and jittery guitars, on top of whizzy synths and a melodic “heya heyaaa” swiftly flying over it all. One hell of a pleasant surprise!
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Julian Axelrod: Black British Music (2025) is a hilariously nondescript title for such an ambitious album, but it also captures Jim Legxacy’s ability to meld any and every genre into a sound that’s unmistakably him. Nestled between Spanish guitar ballads, grime bangers and trap abstractions is “’06 Wayne Rooney,” a yearning new wave rager that retells Jim’s tumultuous upbringing through a series of haikus from rock bottom. The chorus is a red herring; the motivating question isn’t “How’d I get here?” but “What do I do now?” Heard through this context, you can’t blame him for wanting to explore every possible option at once, often in a single song. But rather than feeling overstuffed, “’06 Wayne Rooney” offers the sleekest possible version of a pop anthem, all rounded edges and naked emotion. I’d be tempted to compare him to another genre-defying Black genius who blew up singing “hey ya” if he hadn’t already beat me to it.
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Will Adams: Flipping the title hook from a song most commonly associated now with wedding dancefloors into an existential cry is inspired, and it forms the emotional anchor of “’06 Wayne Rooney”‘s chorus. The verses provide the set-up: in recounting his troubled youth, there’s little else for Jim to say except “how’d I get here?”
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Andrew Karpan: Hearing the energetic phraseology of “Hey Ya!” in a clipped, melancholy British accent already reminded me of what a British professor once told me was called “transatlantic modernism,” and this was even before Mr. Legxacy said it best himself when he announced to the NYT that he was crafting a futuristic version for the present based on what has existed in the past. Call it reverse-hauntology, call it getting out of the grave & put on your red shoes and dance the blues..
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William John: The verses, though written perhaps more elegiacally, are backed by the type of unremarkable guitar line favoured by the likes of, say, the Kid LAROI. The chorus, by contrast, is all repetition, but its liveliness serves as an effective contrast to the dolour of what precedes it. It’s enough to make you want to reach your hand out and help Jim Legxacy out of his statis and away from further emotional unravelling.
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Nortey Dowuona: The drum programming from J Moon is a welcome surprise. It’s simple yet bouncy, despite the final snare roll threatening rhythmic simplicity. It’s easy to focus on Legxacy, since the drums lock into a smooth, easy to dismiss rhythm, it surprisingly doesn’t fade from you mind, becoming a prominent stride below the well arranged guitar chords and subtle, swirling bass, easily remaining a direct loping cadence that once it shifts into a snare run still keeps your ear on it, no matter how stiff it may sound. A stiffness not present in a better rock record with a black singer.
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Claire Biddles: Didn’t expect this to be so Kerrang! TV coded (song not video) (highly complimentary)
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Taylor Alatorre: There’s a tension between the pulsing immediacy of the pop punk backing track and the smeared-out reverb effects applied to Jim Legxacy’s voice. It’s a productive tension, serving as a symbol of the impassable distances created by time, of the humbling divergence between those soaring childhood dreams and sordid adult realities. But it’s productive of a distance in the listener’s mind as well, working in concert with the song’s title and the “Hey Ya!” interpolation to have us gazing glossily into an unreachable past instead of addressing the chorus’s central question, one that extends into the vital present: “How’d I get here?” What I’m saying is this would have gone even harder if Legxacy had sung like he was, in that moment, auditioning for a 2000s FIFA soundtrack.
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Jel Bugle: Important to note that Wayne Rooney’s best goal scoring seasons were actually 2009/10 and 2011/12. This was all right.
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Scott Mildenhall: If going months without scoring, fracturing a metatarsal and trying to neuter Ricardo Carvalho are Jim Legxacy’s intended parallels, they’re about right. Early Rooney seemed powered by frustration; always escaping some kind of trap, if not with such obvious melancholy. That has clear musical appeal, but this doesn’t take it far enough. While it rattles along agreeably, it leaves far less impression than its lovingly crafted video. If anything, it’s more like ’25 Wayne Rooney: half-formed thoughts given undue import.
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Ian Mathers: What a perfectly lovely, vaguely pop-punk-y, little tune that just happens to be wrestling with some serious personal and societal demons. A surprisingly effective combo, it turns out.
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