Electric Chaos: KhakiKid Drops DONT TOUCH THE CDJ

The visualiser for DONT TOUCH THE CDJ is disarming in its simplicity. KhakiKid standing in a street. Then he’s pictured in a garden. No heavy effects, no smoke and mirrors. Just him, shot plainly, shifting between spaces that could be anywhere. On paper, it shouldn’t sit with a track this chaotic. But it does. The contrast sharpens both.

And then it cuts KhakiKid dancing in the street. Not staged, not slick. Just movement for the sake of it. It’s the kind of thing most of us imagine doing when a song hits, but hold back from because someone might be watching. He doesn’t hold back. That refusal to edit himself is what makes it click.

The track itself swerves. Aki Oke’s production pulls garage rhythms apart, rebuilding them into something jagged and restless. The bass rattles like loose change in a pocket, the percussion darts in odd angles. KhakiKid doesn’t try to smooth it out. He leans in, tossing off lines with comic timing, then landing heavier without warning. It’s messy in the best way the kind of energy that makes you feel like the whole thing could collapse if he wasn’t holding it together.

And then there’s the accent. Dublin, unfiltered. The first listen, you might strain to catch each word, but the second time through, it’s the accent itself that stays with you. In a genre where cadences too often blend into one another, his voice cuts through. It doesn’t sound like anyone else in this lane. That difference matters. In 2025, originality is scarce. KhakiKid still sounds new.

The timing is deliberate. The single drops Thursday, two days before Electric Picnic. He’s booked on the Electric Arena stage, capacity twelve thousand, and will run the track live for the first time. It’s not just a performance; it’s a test. Will the off-kilter rhythms translate? Will the accent land as heavy through subwoofers as it does through headphones? The crowd will decide in real time.

Abdu the middle child of six, Irish and Libyan grew up on a council estate in Dublin, cutting his teeth on Channel U videos, American rap CDs, and the sense that music could carve out space where nothing else could. He started rapping at twelve. By his late teens, he was releasing tracks that didn’t sound like anything else coming out of the city.

The Moanbag EP last year widened the circle. 'Date Nite' caught fire online, millions of streams, a live performance slot on The Late Late Show. The rest of the record showed different shades: funk-driven hooks, bruised confessions, ADHD-coded spirals of attention and distraction. It was the sound of someone figuring out how far they could stretch.

Since then, the spotlight has grown sharper. Collaborations with Bricknasty, SOFY, Saint Demarcus. Co-signs from Anderson .Paak, Jessie Reyez, Lola Young. Dazed calling him the 'silly saviour' of Irish alt-rap. NME naming him “poised to be Ireland’s next great rap hero.” These aren’t empty blurbs; they’re signals that people far outside Dublin are paying attention.

But accolades don’t tell the whole story. What stands out is how self-directed he remains. He shoots and edits his own visuals. He shapes the frame around his music the same way he shapes his verses offbeat, playful, slightly jarring in the best sense. It’s not control for the sake of control. It’s making sure the world he’s building doesn’t get flattened out by outside hands.

Identity runs under it all. The Libyan-Irish heritage. The ADHD he’s spoken about openly. The displacement, the constant thread of belonging and not-belonging. These aren’t turned into slogans or easy narratives. They surface as fragments: a line dropped mid-track, a shift in tone, a sideways glance in a video. He’s not lecturing. He’s living it.

That’s part of why DONT TOUCH THE CDJ works. On the surface, it’s loud, jagged, almost reckless. But beneath it, there’s the weight of someone who knows exactly what they’re doing with that chaos. The visualiser captures the contradiction a restless, high-energy track paired with images of stillness, then suddenly him dancing alone in the street. It shouldn’t fit. It fits perfectly.

November, he headlines Dublin’s 3Olympia Theatre. One of the city’s most iconic venues. For someone raised not far from it, that’s not just another gig. It’s a homecoming, a claim to space, a reminder that Irish rap doesn’t have to copy anyone else to matter.

"My dream in music and biggest gig to date

She will sell out, get your tickets early 💚"

His accent intact, jokes intact, contradictions intact. That’s what makes him one of the rare ones.

On Thursday, when DONT TOUCH THE CDJ lands, the headphones will catch it first. But the real moment comes days later, when twelve thousand people hear it rattle through the Electric Arena. Picture him there: bass shaking the floor, accent cutting through the noise, dancing because he feels like it. The CDJ, of course, untouched.