Huck

When I was fresh out of journalism college, I pitched a feature about Arofish, the first Western graffiti artist to paint on the West Bank Wall, to a magazine that had caught my eye. It was pretty new on the scene, but it seemed to cater entirely to my tastes in art, music, culture, surf, skate and people. That magazine was Huck. They accepted that pitch for issue number 3 – I think it was my first-ever paid commission. Now I find myself as Huck’s new Editor and this magazine you’re reading is issue 78. I couldn’t be more proud of it. There’s a resilience to everyone in this issue – it’s full of people who’ve fought to do things on their own terms. Cover star Denzel Curry tells us about…

“YO SHAN, I DON’T EVEN KNOW where the venue’s at, my guy!”, Denzel Curry is asking for directions to huge music venue Terminal 5 in his best impression of a New York accent. Itʼs the weekday lunch rush in Midtown Manhattan, and the Florida rapper is cracking joke after joke as heʼs having his photos taken. “Not the glizzy stand! You canʼt be serious!” he quips after the photographer suggests a shot in front of a Sabrett hot dog cart on the corner. Even in a sea of pedestrians and sensory overload, it’s hard for Denzel to blend in – beyond his signature wick hairstyle being a dead giveaway, his animated personality and confident stature draw curious onlookers. “The name’s Terrence Jenkins,” he deadpans, before cracking a mischievous grin for a…

“THERE ARE SO MANY OF THEM!” Mikaela Loach squeals with delight as she runs into a clearing and dives to the ground. The 24-year-old climate activist pops her head above the ferns after a couple of minutes, returning with her bounty. “I get quite emotional about mushrooms,” she half jokes as she fills our photographerʼs reflector bag with handfuls of what she thinks are bright orange chanterelle. Weʼre deep in the woods near her family home in the south of England, without signal and no way of verifying her hunch. “Iʼve been really trying to get into foraging,” she says as she ducks down again after finding another big patch – her Afro and signature pink coat dart up and down between the foliage as she talks and exclaims with delight. She…

Leo Baker looks good. As the competitive pro skater logs on to Zoom from his New York City apartment, afternoon sunlight spills into his spacious living room, softly illuminating his freckles and slightly throwback middle part haircut. When he smiles, which he does a lot, he takes on a charmingly confident demeanour, like the one he adopts when he finally lands a particularly challenging trick in the legendary skate videos heʼs been making since he was a teen. ALL THIS PERSONALITY WOULDN’T BE SO REMARKABLE if it wasn’t in such stark contrast to the person at the centre of Stay on Board: The Leo Baker Story, Giovanni Reda and Nicola Marsh’s unflinching Netflix documentary that chronicles Baker’s road to, and then retreat from, skating in the 2020 Olympic Games. At what many…

COMEDIAN, ACTOR AND RECENT CONTESTANT on Strictly (the UK version of Dancing With the Stars) Jayde Adams reclines on a sofa in the Mondrian London Shoreditch, slowly raising her leg to vertical, showing off her flexibility. Two of her best friends sit across from her, unimpressed. They’ve seen this behaviour before. The pair are award-winning TV writer and comedian Jack Rooke, whose recent autobiographical TV show Big Boys – about a young man dealing with grief and sexuality – received critical acclaim, and singer Self Esteem whose much lauded sophomore album, Prioritise Pleasure, has achieved cult status along with a Mercury Prize nomination. The talented trio have achieved their success through hard work, self-belief and never giving up. We invited them to discuss their relationship, their individual bumpy roads to success, how…

BACK IN THE MID-NOUGHTIES, book-ending a night out at London’s The End, Liverpool’s Korova, Manchester’s The Warehouse Project or New York’s The Dark Room, the pre- and after-parties will inevitably have been soundtracked by a compilation CD. And, if your musical tastes were of the then nascent guitar-and-dancefloor crossover type, the chances are it was probably from the label Maison Kitsuné. Indie Sleaze? Indie-Rave? Electro-rock? Nu-rave? In what’s become a difficult genre retroactively to name – but currently wildly popular to reminisce about on social media – a lot of the roads lead back to Paris, specifically to Maison Kitsuné, a French-Japanese company founded by Gildas Loaëc and Masaya Kuroki 20 years ago. “We created Kitsuné with the desire to spend our days doing what we loved, and to create a brand…