Jordan

Hailing from Salford in Greater Manchester, this U.K. musician of Irish descent first took up rapping at age 25, centering his lyrics on stories of family, crime, redemption, and local allegiance. Self-made momentum produced more than 100 million online views of his tracks within three years and secured an Abbey Road session for his debut mixtape, Crooks & Queens, issued in November 2022.

Jordan McCann entered the world in 1994 and grew up under his mother’s care in Little Hulton, the Salford district that once housed Peter Hook and the Ryder brothers of Happy Mondays. Prospects remained scarce for him and his six siblings. An arrest for burglary at 13 landed him in a secure unit, after which he cycled in and out of prison on assorted charges for the next twelve years.

West Coast rap, above all the output of Antioch, California’s Woodie—who himself emerged from gangs, drugs, violence, and crime—supplied his primary spark. When Jordan began rapping in his early twenties, his delivery also carried the bite and stance of another idol, Liam Gallagher.

A freestyle he dropped in 2019 led to his first two singles, “Lifestyle” and “Old Friends,” the latter a collaboration with Brixton’s Ard Adz. Over four months in mid-2019 the videos for those tracks surpassed three million views, spurring him forward. Halloween brought the prison-themed “Took Me Back,” and within twelve months he reached the U.K. Top 50 as a guest on Morrisson’s “Brothers.” He closed the year with “Christmas Freestyle,” while 2021 found him on Bad Boy Killer Crew’s “Footsteps on My Shoes.”

Freestyle turns on platforms such as P110 and Mixtape Madness in early 2022 lifted his profile further. The July release of “Little Hulton” on NQ Records, however, launched the campaign for his own mixtape.

By September 2022 his videos had already drawn over 100 million individual views, even before the second single, “Danny Boy”—a joint effort with Maverick Sabre and U.K. primetime TV’s Big Narstie—appeared. That month also featured Jordan in the role of Bully in episodes of the rap-themed U.K. drama Jungle. When Crooks & Queens arrived in November, it debuted inside the U.K. Top 60.