Rappers to Watch in 2026

The charts fell silent in late 2025, letting non-rap fans yap, and forcing a necessary reset. A new generation now builds locally rather than chasing the global algorithm.

Shatter the Standards and Lillian Sharpe

Jan 05, 2026

The center has not held, and the genre is better for it. Where previous years chased the mono-culture—a single sound, a single silhouette, a single city—the incoming class of 2026 thrives on fragmentation. These artists do not seek to flatten their regions or their references into a digestible paste. Instead, they double down on the idiosyncrasies of their own syntax, trusting that the specific is the only path to the universal. They are world-builders who understand that cohesion is not about sounding like the radio, but about sounding like a distinct, unbreakable logic.

We see a return to the album not as a playlist (hopefully the trend continues onward), but as a bounded territory. The pacing of these careers suggests a rejection of the churn. They move with the patience of craftsmen who know that a durable discography outweighs a viral spike. This creates a landscape where technical proficiency is no longer a “throwback” virtue but a baseline requirement for cutting through the noise. The bars are sharper, the pockets are deeper, and the production choices lean toward the tactile and the warped rather than the polished and the preset.

This list does not predict who will sell the most sneakers or land the biggest beverage partnership. It identifies the writers who are altering the temperature of the room. From the lo-fi abstraction of Oakland to the high-gloss storytelling of Brooklyn, these twenty artists are not waiting for permission to shift the paradigm. They are simply doing the work, one verse at a time, outside of the Billboard-pushing narrative.

AZ Chike

AZ Chike has been in the cut since 2013, when he and his crew formed the AzCult collective in South Central. His 2017 single “Burn Rubber Again” crossed 25 million SoundCloud streams, got him a co-sign from Shoreline Mafia, and landed him on a Rolling Loud stage—all before any label came calling. The major breakthrough happened in 2024: he appeared on ScHoolboy Q’s Blue Lips on the track “Movie,” performed at Kendrick Lamar’s Juneteenth concert, The Pop Out, at Kia Forum, then landed on GNX with the verse on “Peekaboo” that Kendrick rapped at Super Bowl LIX. By February 2025, he’d signed to Warner Records and dropped “Whatx2” with a video featuring baby goats—yes, G.O.A.T.s—because subtlety isn’t really his register. He’s been candid about the hustle in ways most rappers avoid: posting TikToks about how badly he wanted to perform at Kendrick’s Grand National tour, leaving voice notes to secure the spot, talking openly about years of grinding before anyone outside LA cared. In a VIBE interview he called his mission “collecting West Coast Infinity Stones”—DJ Quik, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre—and rattled off Future, Smino, Doechii, and UK rapper Dave as future targets. “Hit a Nerve” kicks off the rollout for his upcoming album N.R.F.T.W.

Ben Reilly

“Maytag (Tax Free)” was designed to launder people—Ben Reilly’s words, not mine—and its July 2021 release sat quietly on Freelance until a 14-second TikTok clip he posted from his restaurant job grabbed six million views overnight. The song eventually hit #1 on Spotify’s Viral 50 in multiple countries and has since cleared 52 million streams, but it didn’t radically shift his approach. The Brownsville-born, Atlanta-raised rapper (he moved south at 13) had spent a decade with his Abstract Media collective before striking solo during the pandemic, and that runway gave him patience most viral acts never develop. His November 2025 debut Save! is built on a concept he sketched ten years ago—a Spider-Man origin story where his late grandfather plays Uncle Ben—and the album dropped on his grandfather’s birthday with 590 Osbourne Street, his childhood home’s address, on the cover. 9th Wonder handed him a beat from 2004 for “Responsibility”; Powers Pleasant (Joey Badass’s longtime producer) and Avatar Benji from Spillage Village fill out the rest. Features include Westside Boogie and Zyah Belle. The album’s six-city tour kicks off this month in Chicago, closing in Los Angeles on March 5. Kei Henderson, who managed 21 Savage during his rise, discovered Reilly and got back into rap management specifically because of him.

Chris Patrick

At Rider University in 2016, Chris Patrick won the R Factor Talent Show and pocketed $500—then opened for Travis Scott on the Birds in the Trap Sing McKnight tour a month later with barely any recorded music to his name. He rushed from track practice to the stage, was told explicitly not to walk through Travis’s cowboy doors, and sweated through his set. That same hungry energy carried him through years of Best Buy shifts and student loan payments, until JID’s “151 Rum” convinced him to quit and bet on himself. The gamble paid small dividends first: “SWISH” landed on the NBA 2K21 soundtrack, and his From the Heart, Vol. 2 mixtape earned nods from Black Thought, Nas, Isaiah Rashad, and Joe Budden. Then Def Jam signed him in fall 2024, and his December 2025 album Pray 4 Me arrived with Conductor Williams producing “Frankenstein” and features from Westside Boogie, SWAVAY, and Amindi. Months ago, his freestyle over Kendrick Lamar’s “Man at the Garden” on Kai Cenat’s Mafiathon 3 stream got Kai to declare it his favorite of the month. He’s been transparent about depression and therapy in his bars—East Orange doesn’t have a defined rap identity, but Patrick is actively building one.

ENNY

In late 2020, Jorja Smith scouted ENNY off some YouTube freestyles and signed her to FAMM, making her the label’s first artist. A few months later, the Thamesmead-raised rapper and Smith performed “Peng Black Girls Remix” on A COLORS SHOW, racking up over 25 million views and turning what ENNY thought would be a “London thing” into an international moment. She’d quit her job to pursue music right as the pandemic hit—talk about timing—and built her foundation through Root 73, the East London studio collective that’s incubated much of the city’s alt-rap and soul-leaning talent. Her 2023 EP We Go Again came with Loyle Carner on “Take It Slow” and production from longtime collaborator Paya alongside Beat Butcha and Linden Jay; she co-directed the “Charge It” video herself, her first time behind the camera. Smino jumped on the remix later that year, bridging London and St. Louis over a groove that made the transatlantic pairing feel inevitable. By then she’d hit BBC Sound of 2022, MTV PUSH, Glastonbury, Primavera, and crossed 100 million streams. Her father taught her keyboard at six; her brother put her onto J Dilla; she absorbed gospel and jazz through family and friends. All of it shows up in music that’s soulful and narrative-heavy without chasing trends. She almost tricked thus that she was quitting last year (it was a marketing ploy), but we hope she’ll finally release her debut album this year.

Errol Holden

Nobody knew Errol Holden’s real name until he started rapping—in the streets he was just “H-O.” The Harlem-Bronx rapper has only held two legitimate jobs in his life: one for Dapper Dan, one at the Harlem River Houses library, both of which ended with him taking paychecks. After dropping out of high school, he hustled for decades across 123rd and 111th Street, Pittsburgh, South Carolina, upstate—complete with incarceration and fractured family dynamics. In 2019 he went cold turkey on the streets and started writing. Those early self-released projects moved through social media outreach for sizable sums before Nas’ Mass Appeal came calling. Now he’s running with Roc Marciano’s PIMPIRE International, signed a distribution deal with Roc Nation, and was the first artist Cam’ron tapped for his Freestyle Fridays platform. His February 2025 debut Supreme Magnetic led off a year that’s included Joe Frog 2 and collaborative work with Roc Marci on Mulberry Silk Road; he also landed a feature on Big L’s posthumous Harlem’s Finest: Return of the King alongside Nas, Joey Bada$$, and Method Man. “Errol is something special; he is bringing game to the game,” Roc Marciano said in an interview. “Shit is inspirational.” At SOB’s for Roc’s 4/20 show, he opened while Busta Rhymes, Large Professor, and The Alchemist watched from the crowd.

JIREH

The Baton Rouge underground that produced Quadry and the Col-Der-Sac collective has been quietly stacking MCs for years, but JIREH might be the first to build an entire album around a therapy breakthrough. Perfect Circle, his October 2024 full-length, maps fifteen tracks onto the Jungian archetypes—Hero, Sage, Caregiver—each song a different mask he’s learned to recognize in himself. On “MAMASONG,” he writes toward reconciliation with his mother, not dramatizing the wound but working it like a knot he’s finally patient enough to untangle. His drawl curls syllables without slowing them down, and when he raps “Niggaas like me ain’t wasting no time/Niggas like me sick of punching that clock” on “WHOADIE,” the frustration sounds earned, not performed. He appeared in the 2021 documentary WTF! (We the Future) alongside two dozen local rappers trying to push the city past its reputation for violence. Before Perfect Circle, he dropped A Guide 2 Recognizing Your Saints in 2023. Although it may seem like a jarring pick, he still has gas left in his tank.

Kai Ca$h

At seven years old, Kai Ca$h took the subway from Brooklyn to the Bronx with his older cousin to record his first song—made it home at 2 AM, got grounded, didn’t care because he had a burnt CD in his pocket with his voice on it. That was the confirmation. Growing up, his father, Rubin Sandy, ran in Junior M.A.F.I.A. circles—Biggie, Lil Kim, Lil Cease were around—and the family connection to the Bad Boy person meant access to industry elders like Fabolous and Jadakiss, who mentored him on the business. He could’ve cashed in those chips years ago, but he built the C.Y.N. collective instead, going viral with freestyle videos and grinding through college while making music. DJ Drama and Don Cannon’s Generation Now signed him—the same label that broke Lil Uzi Vert and Jack Harlow—and he opened for Cordae on the From a Bird’s Eye View Tour, touched stages at Rolling Loud and Day N Vegas. His 711 EP and its deluxe version showed range, with Chris Brown on “Tank” and CEO Trayle on the tracklist. He’s also a designer and author, because why limit yourself to one lane when you grew up watching the architects build an empire? Last year at SXSW, he performed as part of Generation Now’s push, with more singles dropping. The lineage is undeniable, but he’s deliberately earning it the long way.

La Reezy

At four years old, La Reezy dressed up as Michael Jackson and performed at his family’s birthday parties; by six he was rapping on top of his mother’s truck in New Orleans. He started recording his early stuff on a $50 microphone before scrapping everything pre-2023 to avoid getting sued over uncleared YouTube beats. Reeborn marked the true beginning—self-written, self-produced, self-engineered—and when “Birth” caught fire on TikTok, the foundation was already solid. Last year he released three projects by November: Welcome to La Reezyana, the PJ Morton-produced Pardon Me, I’m Different EP, and LAREEZYANA SHAKEDOWN, blending NOLA bounce with soul samples and conscious lyricism. At the BET Awards in June 2025, Kendrick told him directly, “ay boy i be seeing yo stuff, you hard, you representing new orleans good, keep it up.” Tyler, the Creator mentioned him to Zane Lowe on Apple Music as someone he’s excited about. Now he’s opening for Little Simz on her Lotus Tour—his first tour ever—winning over crowds from Atlanta to Hollywood with 30-minute sets of rapid-fire flows and limber dance moves. At 21, he’s produced over 200 songs, shot more than 40 music videos, and performed at Essence Festival. He’s one hungry MC to look out for.

LIFEOFTHOM

Plain Pat helped build Kid Cudi’s Man on the Moon records, shaped beats for Kanye West and Drake across a decade of industry work, and executive-produced Kids See Ghosts. When someone with that résumé decides to produce an entire project for a relatively unknown New York emcee, the decision carries weight before a single bar drops. Driving Blind, released October last year, is LIFEOFTHOM’s debut mixtape—twelve tracks with features from Wiki, Lord Sko, Cautious Clay, and SWAVAY, and it sounds nothing like his earlier EPs Thomas, Robot Jesus, or the 2024 tape Cocotaso with producer Stoic. The Pat production pulls from jazzy soul loops on “42nd St.” and strips drums entirely on “Hands” so Wiki and Thom can trade boss-talk over raw samples, the kind of move that trusts the listener to stay locked without a kick pattern to lean on. Thom’s flow refuses to settle: classic boom-bap rhyme schemes bend into melodic detours mid-verse, his voice sitting conversational until it tightens for emphasis on lines about money and stature. He filmed an On The Radar performance this fall—controlled movement, direct address to camera, no wasted energy. NYC’s underground hasn’t handed anyone a clear crown since the early 2010s blog era scattered its heirs across labels and obscurity. Thom isn’t claiming one yet. He’s just rapping like the next project is already halfway recorded.

MARCO PLUS

One of our “hear this MC,” MARCO PLUS remembers rapping as a toddler in College Park, watching his mom in a flannel shirt and “Stunna” T-shirt while Lil Wayne and the Hot Boys played in the house. He dropped his first tape on SoundCloud on his 18th birthday and put out music through Benjamin Banneker High School, but it wasn’t until 2021 that he started releasing consistently—the pandemic, a newborn daughter, and a deep depression that had him texting a friend about suicide pushed him to take it seriously. The BAKKKSEAT! HOUSE collective pulled him back; founder Smiles found him crying on Instagram and linked with him months later. Since then, he’s released six albums, with his song “Lately” from Tha Souf Got Sum 2 Say spreading after JID posted it in 2022. His 2024 project Solace earned co-signs from J. Cole, Smino, EARTHGANG, Isaiah Rashad, Joey Bada$$, and Wiz Khalifa; JID called him a “real spitta.” Charlamagne dubbed “Real Deal Playa” tough on The Breakfast Club. His On The Radar freestyle cleared a million views across TikTok and Twitter. Now he’s managed by Roc Nation, and Chris Patrick featured him on “Frankenstein,” calling him his “favorite rapper” and declaring “nobody raps better than him.” The video for his 2025 single “omm” has dozens of people in white T-shirts that read “Marco Plus raps better than you.”

Mark Lux

LA’s melodic rap tradition keeps producing disciples, but not all of them sound like they’re still mid-formation. Mark Lux does—and that’s the draw. Last month, his Opened Gates release, released through his LISTEN TO THE KIDS imprint and distributed by Santa Anna, landed on Apple Music’s The New L.A. playlist within weeks, fifteen tracks toggling between snappy funk and darker late-night drift without settling into either mode for too long. Singles “On Point” and “Crutch” surfaced earlier in the year, each one pivoting cadences mid-verse like he’s testing which flow fits the mood. The posse cut “Fades” pulls in Lil Duece, Dudadamthang, and KB Devaughn and somehow doesn’t lose its shape. His 2024 EP Bona Fide New Man introduced him through tracks like “Ego Trippin” and “Good Company,” but Opened Gates stretches wider—“Only Child Syndrome” turns the peculiar habits of growing up without siblings into something uncomfortably specific, the kind of detail most rappers sand down into generality. He’s been building network through features for Jaywop, Sham1016, and SimSimmy, stitching himself into LA’s scattered clusters one guest verse at a time. His voice hasn’t calcified yet. He’s still mid-discovery, which means the next project could sound like anything.

miles cooke

Gary Suarez of Cabbages—one of the few respected writers still doing the work of documenting New York’s underground—wrote the liner notes for Ceci N’est Pas un Portrait, and his assessment cuts clean: miles cooke’s second album is “a stunner,” his grainy voice “spitting surrealist bars that ably dismantle our harrowing times.” The Brooklyn rapper released the ten-track project in exactly this month last year, with production split between Foule Monk, Roper Williams, Jeff Markey, and cooke himself, all of it mixed and mastered by Steel Tipped Dove, who’s handled his sound since his 2022 debut I Used to Feel Things on the WATKK label. His voice sits in the gravel register, never polished, and his writing leans toward the surreal without losing the thread—on “Sangria” he braids burnt skies, rosaries, and strange fruit into verses about survival and betrayal, the imagery piling up until it coheres into something uncomfortably lucid. Features come from Defcee, Skech185, and RAMA, underground fixtures who match his energy without overwhelming it. He’s said he refuses to punch in while recording, rewriting lines until he can deliver them in one breath—if he can’t rap it live, he tears it apart and rebuilds. His influences skew toward Quelle Chris and Denmark Vessey; he’s admitted to trying to imitate both, failing, and finding his own lane in the wreckage. On “Zugzwang,” he produced his own beat and pulled Defcee in for bars that move like chess notation—calculated, patient, waiting for the opening.

Nana

Crenshaw has always produced rappers who carry the neighborhood like a second skeleton—Nipsey Hussle being the most obvious, but the tradition runs deeper and wider than any single martyr. Nana Opong fits that lineage without trying to fill Nipsey’s shoes. The son of Ghanaian immigrants—his father founded one of the first African churches in Los Angeles, his mother ran a business—he started rapping in 2012 under the name Blaison Maven before reclaiming his given name and the weight it carries. His 2020 album Save Yourself drew directly from Nipsey’s and Mac Miller’s deaths, and the track “L.A. Times” with TDE’s Reason crossed two million Spotify streams on the back of verses about surviving a city that doesn’t always let you. In 2022 he dropped the EP From the District to the World with features from Buddy, Garren, Kent Jamz, and Rae Khalil, then landed a COLORS SHOW performance that same year. He spent 2024 releasing singles—“Motion,” which got a remix with South African rapper Nasty C, plus “One Time” and the sequentially numbered “2” and “3”—keeping his voice circulating without rushing a full project. Earlier last month he sat with Van Lathan on Higher Learning to talk LA hip-hop. He keeps naming streets on records: Crenshaw Boulevard, King, Slauson, La Cienega. The geography isn’t decoration.

Niko Brim

Niko Brim spent lunch periods in Mount Vernon, New York, battle rapping at 14, freestyling until he built a reputation that extended beyond the cafeteria. His father ran in music circles as an executive and rapper with F.S. Effect; his mother, Misa Hylton, styled everyone from Lil Kim to Mary J. Blige. But there was a stretch where he and his mom had nothing, and he scraped by teaching swim lessons, walking dogs, selling weed. In 2018, Hylton was styling Rapsody at a hotel in SoHo, and Niko tagged along with a camera to help shoot. He told Rapsody he rapped. She told him to prove it. He did, on the spot, and she took his number. That connection landed him at Jamla Records, where he appeared on 9th Wonder’s Jamla Is the Squad II compilation. By 2021, he dropped B4THETHRONE with Rapsody, Domani, and Reuben Vincent. The next year, he toured with Cordae on the From a Bird’s Eye View run alongside Kai Ca$h (as mentioned earlier) and Coast Contra, then opened for Rapsody on Lauryn Hill’s 25th anniversary Miseducation tour at Barclays in 2023. When he released HUES Vol. 1 through EVEN’s pay-what-you-want model, it cleared a million album-equivalent streams in a month. Now he’s signed to Rapsody’s label We Eachother, and she put him on Please Don’t Cry twice—once on “Niko’s Interlude,” once trading bars with Lil Wayne on “Raw.” Last year, he followed up with André Mego’s Scent of a Woman and kept linking with Kai Ca$h on cuts like “4DaCompany.”

Ovrkast.

Before we knew him as Ovrkast. to the hip-hop space, Silas Wilson spent his teenage years at Bunche Academy in West Oakland as a self-described headphone kid, drowning out the blocks with beats he made himself. By 2015, he was selling instrumentals on Bandcamp—his first sale went to Charlotte rapper MAVI, the first beat MAVI ever bought. Two years later Wilson formed Lo-Fiction, a ten-deep Oakland collective running a West Coast spin on boom bap that caught Pete Rock’s attention when he shared their work online. The Earl Sweatshirt production credit came in 2019 when “El Toro Combo Meal” landed on Feet of Clay, and that opened doors that kept swinging: Drake tapped him for “Red Button” and “The Shoe Fits,” and in 2024 he linked with Grammy-winning producer Cardo for Kast Got Wings, then opened for MAVI on the shadowbox tour and freestyled alongside Lupe Fiasco on Sway in the Morning. This past May he dropped his sophomore album While the Iron Is Hot with Vince Staples, Saba, and MAVI aboard. The night before release, he threw a listening party at the Carhartt WIP store in Williamsburg; a few months earlier, he’d shot the “Cut Up” video on Lakeshore Avenue with 200 fans swarming around a pickup truck. Oakland hasn’t produced a hip-hop star in a minute. Wilson’s trying to change that.

PARTYOF2

Jadagrace landed in Terminator Salvation at nine, got signed to Epic Records at twelve, and spent her teenage years being mentored by Berry Gordy and Smokey Robinson. SWIM bounced between Nickelodeon’s Bella and the Bulldogs and TBS’s Are We There Yet? before he hit high school. Child actors who survived Hollywood’s churn and found each other through disillusionment with the industry—they started making music together in 2019 as grouptherapy., a four-piece collective with producer TJOnline (Tyrel Jackson Williams from Lab Rats). The group built a following through projects like I Was Mature for My Age, But I Was Still a Child, but TJOnline stepped away in March 2024. Jadagrace and SWIM almost hung it up entirely. Instead, they rebranded, announced PARTYOF2 in January 2025, and dropped the We Owe You an Explanation EP on Def Jam months later. “Poser” cleared tens of millions of Spotify streams and became their first video to break a million YouTube views. For their October debut, Amerika’s Next Top Party!, they wrote “Friendly Fire” by listing their own insecurities, trading papers, then roasting each other’s weaknesses over boom-bap. This lyrical exercise doubled as therapy. KAYTRANADA contributed production, and the album has no features because they didn’t need any. They proved they can stand on their own.

PLUTO

On the road to becoming PLUTO, Jada Smith was doing hair on Atlanta’s west side when a snow day TikTok changed everything. The Washington High School graduate had been freestyling since she was fourteen, recording herself over YouTube beats, but “Whim Whamiee” turned a hobby into a career overnight. She’d written it after stumbling onto a beat sampling DJ Cool Breeze and OJ Da Juiceman’s “Wham Bam”—itself a nod to D4L’s Mook B—and the finished track, produced by Zaytoven with YKNiece trading bars, became one of those songs that sound like they’ve always existed in Atlanta’s ratchet party music canon. Sexyy Red, Latto, Lizzo, and Queen Key all posted their own verses fighting for remix placement—Red won. By March, Motown had signed her. By June 2025, she’d dropped her debut Both Ways, opened for Lil Baby on the WHAM Tour, performed Hot 107.9’s Birthday Bash at State Farm Arena, and earned Billboard’s Hip-Hop Rookie of the Month. “Pull Yo Skirt Up” went viral when food influencer Keith Lee made it a dance challenge. She named the album Both Ways because she wanted to prove she could make shake-that-butt music and drill music and love songs in equal measure. October brought Pluto World—nineteen tracks with YoungBoy Never Broke Again, Quavo, and Sexyy Red aboard—plus her first headlining tour. She still hasn’t gotten that Lululemon collaboration she keeps ad-libbing about, but the year isn’t over.

Reuben Vincent

At only thirteen years old, Reuben Vincent recorded a mixtape called IDOL.escent using Apple headphones in his Charlotte bedroom. The quality was terrible, he admits, but he kept emailing it to producers anyway. A fan in Oakland named Mr. Drake tweeted it at 9th Wonder, who happened to be scrolling on an off day during tour, clicked play, and DMed the kid. Vincent drove two hours to Raleigh, lost his notebook of songs the week before the session, and still managed to cut nine tracks in three days. By sixteen he was signed to Jamla Records. He’d grown up in a Liberian household on the east side of Charlotte, writing raps at four years old in the Lake Point Apartments off Albemarle Road, listening to Pac and Biggie in his father’s blue Cadillac. He graduated from high school six months early and spent the extra time recording instead of sleeping. When Madden NFL 2020 needed tracks, 9th submitted Vincent’s “No Problems”—his college friends at N.C. A&T heard his voice coming through the speakers without knowing it was him. In summer 2021, he clocked out of his shift at a hat store and checked his phone to find 9th calling about a Roc Nation offer. He didn’t tell his mother until she started yelling at him for not filling out class registration. This October, he and 9th dropped Welcome Home—sixteen tracks with Ab-Soul, Wale, and Raphael Saadiq aboard—and the album closes on a sample that echoes “Life’s a Bitch” while Vincent raps about realizing home isn’t a place.

SALIMATA

SALIMATA spent her teenage years freestyling over whatever YouTube threw at her—house music, UK grime, free jazz—sharpening a flow that could land on anything. She’d post the results to Facebook, building an audience one clip at a time while running a Tumblr account that connected her to creatives like Danii Phae and Ken Rebel. By 2021, she had “Mock Me,” a track Pitchfork praised with the line: “Sometimes you just want to hear someone talk shit, and SALIMATA has that down pat.” MIKE heard her and pushed her toward 10k Global, where she dropped Salimata Presents – OUCH in 2022 and Wooden Floors two years later with Pink Siifu and MIKE himself aboard. She opened for MIKE across Europe in early 2024, then came back stateside and filmed an On The Radar freestyle that racked up 50K likes on TikTok while she rapped about getting your weave snatched for talking out of order. Her mother, who grew up in Côte d’Ivoire, still hand-sews the bulk of her stage outfits. This past December she released The Happening, recorded mostly in Marseille, where she now splits her time.

tg.blk

About five years ago, tg.blk found a beat on YouTube that had already been sold to another artist. She begged producer baileydaniel to let her have it anyway, then recorded “Love Being Used” in her university dorm in Maryland, mixing and mastering it herself before sitting on the track for nearly a year because she didn’t like the sound of her own singing. She finally uploaded it—and Vince Staples reposted it. The song now sits at over four million streams. Born Thigi in Kenya’s coastal city of Mombasa, she first recorded in 2016 after watching Straight Outta Compton, downloading a cracked copy of Logic and posting her experiments to Reddit anonymously. Her name is styled in all lowercase as a nod to MF DOOM. She still sources nearly all her beats from YouTube, scrolling through pages for hours the way she did in college. This past July she dropped ITS NOT THAT DEEP, a six-track EP she sequenced minutes before uploading—her way of getting over what she calls “release-anxiety.” On “Motorola Money,” she raps about bad bitches making money online with ChatGPT, her first self-described “bad bitch anthem.”