The Future of Underground Rap Is Extremely Online
By the time you figure out where a song by New York rapper and producer Xaviersobased is coming from, it’s usually already over. On 2021’s “115 & LSD,” which the 20-year-old cites as a creative breakthrough in his music, he builds up a cacophony of exotic-bird whistles, overlapping hums, overheard yells, exploding machine-gun shells, and blown-out 808s across just two minutes. Xavier’s songs often repeat halfway through at double speed; his voice tumbles through verses about twerking and trapping and blunt toking and Xbox. “On My Own,” from his recent mixtape Keep It Goin Xav, turns raw feedback into the bass below a never-quite-conclusive loop of beeps, the deep tones and danceable hi-hats forming an atmosphere as casual as it is intricate.
Xavier has established himself as the eyes and ears of a movement bubbling through two other young talents: the soulful Alabama warbler YhapoJJ, 20, who favors a hazy, trap-influenced sound and gothic image crafted with help from an online artist friend based in the Czech Republic; and fresh-faced firebrand Nettspend, 16, whose foxish European features are usually half-concealed under a swoop of ice-blond hair that recalls spiritual ancestor Justin Bieber as much as rock god Kurt Cobain. Xavier, Yhap, and Nett have been posited as the event horizon of so-called mumble rap, and the first chairs in a rowdy orchestra of new SoundCloud-born heroes somewhere between the likes of Lil Uzi Vert and the late Lil Peep.
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Although their music crams in plenty of Gen Z-beckoning references — SpongeBob and Twilight and Photo Booth selfies of tweens with heat-straightened hair — none of these artists are making music exclusively for kids. Just look at the all-ages mix of attention they get, from terminally online kids cutting together videos with their music, scrupulous A&Rs with the right For You pages, and New York Times writers clued into this phenomenon alike. But the music has an undeniable hold on a younger demographic, often playing a role in helping teens, however crudely, process a world that can be extremely bleak. One of Xavier’s most popular TikTok snippets blew up when it became the song du jour for a trend called the “fent stance,” where users assumed the buckled pose all too familiar these days as an effect of the deadly synthetic drug supercharging the modern opioid epidemic. Funny it isn’t; plainly indicative of modern coping mechanisms toward societal ills, it is.
Xavier, who began producing before he settled on his hypnotic flow, finds the bones of his beats everywhere — from Windows power-up noises to snippets of hubbub he catches on city streets. As a producer, he’s gifted at giving his laid-back tales a feeling of drama: a song about a vibrator crescendos euphoric layers of piano worthy of any blockbuster-romance kiss. He says he tends to work spontaneously, something Yhap and Nett each echo. Nett likes to pull up the production software Bandlab wherever he is, so he can “go to town” without losing momentum. “Instead of thinking of it and writing it down,” Xavier expands, “I’ll think of it and do it.”
Many of the trio’s songs have gone viral on TikTok, the app of choice for a post-internet generation accustomed to a world where seconds-long videos can loop forever. The passing head rush of popular sounds like Xavier’s “patchmade,” Yhap’s “JJETLAGG,” and Nett’s “We not like you” sets the scene for skate tricks, fit pics, and front-camera goofing. A few scrolls down, the videos lean even further into shitpost modernism: vividly fried smash cuts of the rappers dancing at shows or on Instagram Live interwoven with dance duets with AI roaches and Roblox streams.
It is all extremely online, and both Xavier and Yhap say they don’t see a huge difference between finding a kindred spirit via DM or in person, as long as they’re able to catch the right vibe through a well-placed sample or killer meme. Sometimes, the invisible string of the activity-based algorithm is exactly what makes the right collaborator feel like a stroke of magic. “It’s like, I don’t know you and you don’t know me, but we found each other through this thing called the internet. And now we’re making music together that our fans love,” Yhap says. “It’s a great feeling.”
Born and raised on the Upper West Side, Xavier is quicker to call his music “New York shit” than any of the various subgenres it’s been categorized under online. His family has been in the city since the 1970s, when his mom’s side emigrated from the Dominican Republic. Xavier and his older brother, Alexander, will be visiting later this year to walk her down the aisle when she weds her partner of 12 years, Indhira.
Xavier’s mom, Evelyn, began working as a house DJ in the 1980s, spinning smooth electronic blends of techno and popular rap for decades at parties throughout Manhattan. That meant there was production software on the family computer from the time Xavier could reach the mouse. Sitting around a table of fajitas on the Lower East Side with Indhira and Xavier, Evelyn pulls up a home movie on Facebook that depicts two of Xavier’s cousins leaning up against a table stacked with her decks, rapping into corded microphones. A six-year-old Xavier bobs in and out of frame, twisting his head, hands, and shoulders with focus, far less interested in showboating than riding his own wave. She recalls being confused by a song Xavier said inspired him to make music because the vocalist wasn’t rapping on beat. “That’s what’s cool about it,” she remembers him explaining.
YhapoJJ grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, a childhood soundtracked by his mother’s curated mix of Toni Braxton, Tracy Chapman, Rich Homie Quan, and Young Thug. But more than anything, it was the way Queen’s Freddie Mercury could conduct a roaring crowd that made him want to try music himself at age 15. While he says he only freestyles off the dome, not writing ahead of time doesn’t mean he’s not thoughtful about his subdued yet sonorous style. His most streamed song, “1o,” is a soft and fuzzy loop dotted with laughs and cheers, as he muses softly “I got my blunt, and I’m right next to you (I’m writin’ this to you).”
Last December, at Yhap’s first performance with Xavier, in New York, eager fans overran the venue, scaling fire escapes and breaking apart a full-body metal detector before the show was called off, then revived at a Lower East Side skate park. The chaos of his concerts lives in the blogosphere history books now. It was also around the same time Xavier introduced Yhap to Nett’s music. Amid a sea of imitation rage rappers and post-hyperpop monotony, something stood out to Xavier about the Richmond, Virginia, teenager’s demon-spawn stylings.
Nettspend leans into a troublemaking “badass kid” persona, jumping on beds and spraying red wine all over the sheets in the music video for his incendiary guns-blazing anthem “2024 Freestyle.” Still, Nett says he doesn’t really want to be bad. He has three siblings, but felt isolated in school, like “everyone else was in one corner, and I was in another corner.” He loved Future, Michael Jackson, and, yes, Bieber growing up, and first tried out rapping in the fifth grade. He quit high school after his freshman year, starting to seriously pursue music after a friend noted Nett was actually pretty nice with it.
His entire brief career, Nett has worked from anywhere; he recorded his breakout hit, “drankdrankdrank,” in about 10 minutes while seated in his mom’s car in their driveway. (As he explained in a recent interview, he “wasn’t tryna be loud in the crib.”) But “what they say,” the 90-second song that got him a manager, came together even quicker. On the track, needle-sharp cheers overlap with thick, blunt-edged 808s firing at different levels as Nett raps from a lonely perch at the club. “What they say” swaddles the ear so naturally that when the beat abruptly kicks into double-time halfway through, the switch hits like an authoritative finger snapped right between the eyes. Even the name Nettspend happened in an instant. He just needed a SoundCloud handle to post what he’d been working on, and quickly thought of the internet. That being said, he does have some loose long-term plans: “We’re gonna take over.” After we reschedule an initial interview, I see via an Instagram Story that the conflict was because of a meetup with Chief Keef.
The transition to being public figures can be shaky for all three artists, especially this fast. Nett, who posts and deletes on social media at an even brisker clip than he uploads and takes down music, finds the internet downright “scary,” especially once it starts to feed on your hype. “Right now, I can only have people around me that are genuine and that I trust,” he says. These days, Yhap is looking for the same thing, and says he often turns to Xavier to talk about the stress of the industry. “Sometimes I feel the pressure, but then I’m like, ‘Shit, I’m with Xav, and he’s feeling it too,’” he says. While many of his fans mingle largely on social media, Yhap struggles with social anxiety and is careful about reading comments online.
Much of the fast-and-loose trajectories of their careers feels like somewhat of a blur to Xavier and Nett, but their 30-year-old manager Rennessy, who’s worked with underground artists like SpaceGhostPurrp since 2014, holds certain memories close. On his birthday in early July 2022, a few days after running into Xavier and some friends skating in Riverside Park, he found them sharing a stacked lineup at a show only accessible by coordinates eager-enough attendees could access by messaging a certain Instagram account.
At those coordinates, Xavier’s whole crew performed under the light of the moon for a raucous mob as fireworks exploded overhead. Feeling the force of the audience, dancing hard enough to conjure a phantom earthquake, Rennessy didn’t know exactly what he was watching, but it looked like the future. He hit up Xavier immediately after. Behind the virality or streaming numbers or follower counts, there are always hordes of irrepressible young people looking for a late-night thrill.
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