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Cover Story

The shift in Loyle Carner’s persona in recent times is exemplified by the opening songs on his two most recent LPs. On “Hate,” the scorching opener to 2022’s hugo, the south Londoner starts by offering to “let me tell you about what I hate.” He rages against racial profiling, the limited opportunities for young Black men, the pitfalls of his own success and his relationship with his father, concluding: “I fear the color of my skin.”
Now, on his upcoming fourth album, hopefully ! (Island EMI), he strikes a different chord. The opening track — as yet unannounced — is built around a skittish drum beat and soft guitars, and sees Carner, a father of two, singing amid the hum of domesticity. His son plays the xylophone while Carner ponders about his sleeping youngsters, “What language do they speak inside your dreams?” It has the feel of light peeking through the curtains amid the dawn chorus. Let him tell you what he loves.

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When we meet Carner for his first Billboard U.K. cover shoot — and first interview about hopefully ! — he brings that lightness with him. The 30-year-old arrives in London on a break from filming a TV project in Scotland, excited about an upcoming holiday with his girlfriend and two children. hopefully ! (due June 20) is about healing, unconditional love and this new phase of his life; recent double A-side “all i need” and “in my mind” both showcase a sense of serenity and contentment with his lot.

“My relationship with [hopefully !] throughout was quite healthy,” he says in a quiet corner of Shoreditch Studios. “I didn’t have grand expectations and didn’t put loads of pressure on myself. I was able to get to the point where I’m lucky to be able to enjoy it.” In the past, he was “trying to prove something, worrying about what people think” of his music. Now he’s just grateful for the joy these songs give him. He wears a beaming smile as he speaks.

For the past decade, attention has closely followed Carner (born Ben Coyle-Larner) on his journey to becoming a British youth icon. His debut live performance was supporting MF Doom at a show in Dublin, and by age 17, he was on tour with hip-hop don Nas. Debut LP Yesterday’s Gone (2017) was a love letter to the rap that supported him following the death of his stepfather and earned him a nomination for the prestigious Mercury Prize; his sophomore record, Not Waving, But Drowning (2019), spawned a number of streaming hits, including the jazz-tinged “Ottolenghi.”

Throughout his career, he has used his platform to campaign for better awareness of ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), something that he lives with, and the benefits of cooking to help manage those symptoms. His singular voice is a crucial one for Gen Z at a time when British male stars are lacking, and his live shows attract a wide cross-section of U.K. youth culture.

hugo was a huge leap forward. Across the record, he ruminated on his mixed-race heritage (Carner’s mother is white; his biological father is Guyanese) and his place in British society, enlisting esteemed poet John Agard for a spoken word meditation on “Georgetown,” produced by Madlib. On “Blood on My Nikes,” Carner contemplates the knife crime epidemic among young men — both as victims and perpetrators — in the capital. It’s a socially conscious record, but not overwhelmingly bleak, either; he knows when to pair light with shade in order to document the human experience.

Loyle Carner

Lily Brown/Billboard UK

It was his depiction of a difficult relationship with his biological father that resonated with listeners. For many years, the pair were estranged, with Carner describing him as “present at times and not present at other times.” hugo was written and recorded as Carner became a father himself, reflecting on the cycle of resentment and anguish, and how to rebuild a parental relationship. The album closed with “HGU,” seeing the pair share a mundane conversation about driving lessons, which Carner took with his father during the pandemic lockdown.

hugo became his highest-charting and best-selling album yet, landing at No. 3 on the Official U.K. Albums Chart and earning him another Mercury Prize nomination. The Guardian called it a “beautiful, blistering masterpiece.” He reimagined the album with an orchestra for a one-off show at London’s Royal Albert Hall, headlined Wembley Arena and then hosted an even bigger performance at London’s All Points East Festival in August 2024. The 35,000-capacity gig cemented his place at British music’s top table, with a supporting cast of OutKast’s André 3000 and, to come full circle, Nas. In June, he’ll headline Glastonbury’s The Other Stage, putting him on a par with Charli xcx and The Prodigy.

“I think that [hugo] was necessary for a lot of people,” he says of the album’s success. “I still have people messaging me saying, ‘Yo, I just heard that album for the first time yesterday, and it made me want to go and connect with my mum, or grandad,’ or whoever. That to me is the beauty of it, that it’s still doing its job.”

hopefully ! is something of a departure for Carner. More in tune with his love for alternative and indie music, his hip-hop stylings make way for inspiration by Irish rockers Fontaines D.C., cult star Mk.gee, Big Thief, Idles and more. The band he assembled for hugo’s live shows followed him into the studio to bring new textures to his compositions.

“It’s a lot of pressure to step out singularly as a rapper. And I’m not even, like, a ‘rapper.’ I just make music, and people like to put me in that box,” he says. “I loved the anonymity of being in a band. I wanted to be around when the magic is happening and to not just be sent a beat after all the fun parts had already happened. I wanted to move away from the words being all that I can contribute.”

Carner’s pen is still mighty, but in a different way. Since his earliest releases, his words have been what has carried him forward and provided renewed inspiration. On 2019’s “Still,” which he described as his “favourite-ever song” during its performance at the Royal Albert Hall, he speaks about his insecurities with a disarming honesty. The rhyming couplets on hugo’s “Nobody Knows (Ladas Road)” and “Homerton” show remarkable dexterity. He knows when to build tension, but also when to let the words breathe. It’s a skill he learned from his poet heroes like Agard and the late, great Benjamin Zephaniah, the man Carner was named after.

As his family has grown, Carner’s techniques and influences have changed. He describes his son as his muse, and his presence is felt throughout the album. hopefully !’s artwork features a snap of Carner and his son, with colorful scrawls and additions only a child can make with such purpose. His voice babbles away throughout the record and his mischievous personality shines. Words could not contain the emotions Carner feels toward him, so the songs became looser, less literal but still emotionally resonant, and with a greater focus on capturing his son’s “melodic” personality in his songwriting structures.

On one album highlight, Carner speaks of the transition of becoming a father and notes that he’s “falling asleep in a chair I used to write in.” Later, he speaks directly to his son, saying, “You give me hope in humankind.” He has learned to embrace sonic imperfections and to capture a feeling, letting broad brushstrokes stand proudly. There’s a childlike wonder to the rawness of these songs; from snatches of phrases to choruses that linger in your head long after music has ended.

“If you try and color around something or touch it up… you always f–k it up,” Carner says. “That’s what I love about my son’s paintings. It might even be just one line across the page, but the simplicity of how he works and moves on. That’s how I feel now.”

Loyle Carner

Lily Brown/Billboard UK

Carner used the opportunity to embrace his role as a producer-curator. “As a rapper, the insecurity is that I don’t have any musical talent or whatever, so I’m like, ‘F–k, I better fill every gap so people know that I was there, too.’ But now I don’t mind people hearing a song and I’m barely on it, because I’m so across from everything else [in the creative process].”

He sings much of what’s on hopefully !; singing with his son on his bike, in the car and at home encouraged him to let his voice shine. “He never says, ‘Dad you’re way out of tune,’ even if I know that I am.” Here, Carner’s voice has an intimate quality, like he’s caught singing under his breath without a thought as to who might hear it.

He adds: “It’s fearless, but I’m not embarrassed about it and I don’t care because that’s the truth of how I felt. It’s that kind of bravery to me that is a reflection of what it was like to be a man. This living, breathing, feeling, flawed, emotional person that is willing to turn over heavy stones and be accountable for failing.”

Entering his 30s and becoming a parent for a second time brought Carner an emotional clarity about his relationship with his biological father. His stepfather, Nik, who raised him alongside his mother, Jean, died suddenly in 2014 when he was 19. The forthcoming LP encouraged him to embrace his softer side and the personality traits that Carner wished he had experienced with his biological father.

“Me and my dad are cool now, but he wasn’t really around when I was young,” he says. It was time to take a different approach. “My inner child is getting an experience of fatherhood that I never had, which is crazy. I’m not only being a father to my son, I’m also being a father to myself. I’m a person that I never thought I could become.”

Making the record has given Carner a greater perspective about his role and place in the world and in the family dynamic. “I’m not the main character in the movie any more. It’s my son and daughter’s film, and I’m just some extra in that.”

Carner has long been an advocate for a more healthy relationship with masculinity, having worked with suicide prevention charity CALM (Campaign Against Living Miserably). He gave a passionate speech at Reading & Leeds Festival in August 2023 decrying the “toxic masculine bulls–t” that plagued his childhood. His records and shows have helped unlock certain conversations, but the issue remains prescient. Netflix’s streaming hit Adolescence, which examines the fallout from a misogynistic murder by a 13-year-old boy, has sparked new discussions around the manosphere and its pervasive influence.

Carner saw the intensity of the show — which uses one-shot takes — up close on-set; he’s close friends with actor-creator Stephen Graham and director Philip Barantini. The topics at hand need urgent attention, Carner says. “We’re at an essential need for conversation for young boys to let go of this fear, frustration and anxiety and be able to pass it to someone.

“I’m very glad that my son has my daughter to live with,” he adds. “That’s a huge thing for me, and also for me to be in the presence of someone who is growing up to be a woman. For my son, it’s even crazier, as it’s so natural and safe and understood and demystified.”

Loyle Carner

Lily Brown/Billboard UK

The aforementioned Zephaniah features on hopefully !, a full-circle moment for Carner, given his profound influence on his life and as a male role model. Zephaniah, who died in 2023 at 65, was a towering figure in literature, music and politics, vocalizing the Black experience in post-war Britain. Carner honors his hero by sampling a clip of Zephaniah speaking on the Brixton riots, but also the potential and hope of the youth to change things.

“He articulates something that my brain has always wanted to say about masculinity,” Carner says. “Kids that look like me or are stereotyped are full of feeling and emotion and pain, shame, joy, guilt, hope and naivety. And nobody knows how to deal with it.”

Why that clip? “He’s saying what I’m saying about having pent-up rage and emotion; I’d rather use my pen to express it that way in a palatable and safe way.”

Zephaniah’s work, Carner says, taught him how to be a man who feels secure in himself. “His work shows the joy of not taking life so seriously and realizing that it’s fine to be a bit lighter or softer, and know that it doesn’t discredit my legacy or my story to be silly and to let go.”

Later this year, Carner will head on a mammoth U.K. and Ireland tour that takes in residencies at some of the nation’s most historic venues, like London’s Brixton Academy and Manchester, England’s Victoria Warehouse. Before then, he’ll headline The Other Stage at Glastonbury Festival on the Friday-night lineup (June 27) alongside Charli xcx and The Prodigy; it follows his 2023 top billing on the West Holts stage. Recent headliners on the coveted Other Stage include Megan Thee Stallion and Lana Del Rey — comfortably putting him in the big leagues alongside international superstars.

When the slot is mentioned, he’s speechless for a moment. “It feels like an amazing, monumental part of my career,” Carner eventually says. His whole family will be coming to watch on Friday, and then he can celebrate the rest of the weekend and “go see Doechii” the following night on the West Holts stage.

It’s just one page in this new chapter. In March, it was announced that Carner would star in an acting role for BBC’s upcoming crime drama Mint, directed by Charlotte Regan (Scrapper) alongside Emma Laird (28 Years Later) and Sam Riley (Control). The new disciplines that have come with being on-set have inspired him to write and direct his own upcoming project. He wants to promote poetry workshops in schools to the next generation. There are many strings to Carner’s bow as a complex, charismatic cultural figure.

He’s most excited for hopefully ! to come out and for his children to hear the snapshot of this moment, about this family, and about the man their dad was when they were little. But what about the fans’ reaction to the new sound and what they might take from it? “Honestly, I don’t care. It’s totally up to them. They could take nothing and not find it for 10 or 20 years or even hate it, but…”

Carner throws his arms up and laughs. “I haven’t even thought about it, actually. I hope that people that do find it and that it can be a good friend to them.”

Loyle Carner

Lily Brown/Billboard UK

Shoot production by WMA Studios. Photography by Lily Brown. Styling by Lucas Smith. Grooming by Marina Belfon-Rose. Shot at Shoreditch Studios, London.

Anjula Acharia remembers when the one person who had set her up for success told her she was going to fail. And Jay-Z was there, too.
In 2008, Acharia and Interscope Geffen A&M’s then chairman, Jimmy Iovine, were sharing breakfast at a New York hotel. Iovine — who had partnered with Acharia’s South Asian music/news hub, Desi Hits, to develop a Universal Music Group-backed imprint — remembered her previously telling him how much “Beware of the Boys,” Jay-Z’s 2003 remix of Panjabi MC’s bhangra single, had meant to her as the kind of cross-continental exchange that she hoped Desi Hits would foster. So when Acharia stood up to leave the breakfast, Iovine asked her to stick around for a few more minutes… at which point Jay made his surprise entrance.

Acharia, who was in her 30s at the time, geeked out, gushing about her love of “Beware of the Boys” and asking the rap superstar about how the remix had come together. Then Iovine pulled the rug out from under her. “While I was sitting with him and Jay-Z, Jimmy told me that Desi Hits was going to fail,” she recalls. “His words were, ‘I know pop culture, I know a visionary, and this is just way too early. This would be right in 10 to 15 years.’ ”

Anjula Acharia. Styling by Kristina Askerova. Hair and Makeup by Shayli Nayak. Versace dress and jewelry, Paris Texas shoes.

Harsh Jani

A Punjabi kid and die-hard music fan born to South Asian immigrants, Acharia grew up in Buckinghamshire, England, devouring music that fused styles from around the world and dreaming of creating a platform that spoke to both Eastern and Western demographics. She was a senior partner at a London-based executive search firm who co-founded Desi Hits Radio as a popular early podcast in the mid-2000s; then Iovine backed Desi Hits in 2007 as a stateside label for South Asian artists after she moved to New York. The pair helped engineer a crossover hit in 2009 with “Jai Ho,” A.R. Rahman’s Academy Award-winning Slumdog Millionaire theme that was remade for U.S. listeners with The Pussycat Dolls added to it.

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“She was so talented and passionate about the music,” Iovine reflects today, “but sometimes things just don’t come together.” And by the early 2010s, Acharia admitted her mentor had been correct: The world wasn’t ready. “We didn’t have streaming platforms, social sharing or an ecosystem to support the industry,” she explains. “It was just very segmented back then and really hard for things to travel.” She wondered aloud why Iovine had invested in Desi Hits if he had doubted the idea. “And he says, ‘Because you’re an album, not a single.’ ”

On roughly the timeline Iovine predicted, the industry has changed drastically — and Acharia, who spent that intervening time outside of music, is returning to it with an entirely new album, so to speak. She and Warner Music Group exclusively tell Billboard that they have launched 5 Junction Records, a joint-venture label under WMG, as a pipeline for South Asian artists to reach North American listeners, much like a modern Desi Hits but with significantly more established talent and infrastructure. That talent includes its flagship pair of artists: Bollywood mainstay and pop triple-threat Nora Fatehi and ascendant Indian singer-rapper King. Both already have multiple hits and millions of streams overseas, giving them the ideal foundation to take the first crack at establishing North American footholds.

“It’s always been in our mind to promote this music to the world,” King says. “That has always been the fight, but now, I feel like we are at the right time and right spot. The next five years are looking bright.”

King. Styling by Nikita Jaisinghani. Hair by Javed Sheikh and Makeup by Swapnil Haldankar. Versace jacket and shirt, Brune & Bareskin shoes, Amrapali necklace.

Harsh Jani

Nora Fatehi. Styling by Meagan Concessio. Hair and Makeup by Marianna Mukuchyan. David Koma dress, tights and shoes.

Harsh Jani

Acharia believes that a cultural wave is about to crash down on the U.S. mainstream, similar to how Korean pop, Latin music and Afrobeats all made an impact on top 40 radio beginning in the late 2010s. Based on the South Asian market boom over the past decade — by the end of 2023, India had become the second-largest on-demand streaming market in the world, behind only the United States — and the English-language artists who have made overtures in the hemisphere through touring and studio team-ups, she’s not alone in that prediction.

“The best way to think about it is, what are your next billion-user markets?” WMG CEO Robert Kyncl says. He notes that the South Asian industry has been top of mind for him for over a decade: As vp of content at Netflix in the early 2000s, Kyncl saw firsthand the scope of demand for Hindi shows, and as YouTube’s chief business officer in the 2010s, he spent every year in the region, developing partnerships that he believes are paying off today. “You have to invest,” he says. “If you don’t, you’ll wake up five, 10 years from now and realize you just missed this whole new growth era.”

Kyncl has been friends with Acharia since his Netflix days (when he first discovered Desi Hits in the course of researching Hindi shows) and has followed her career closely. After leaving Desi Hits in 2014, Acharia stayed in the entertainment space by managing Priyanka Chopra Jonas, whom she originally signed as a Bollywood star trying to kick-start a music career and now helps steer as a global superstar. Acharia also joined the venture capital company Trinity Ventures before launching her own fund, A-Series Management and Investments, where she was an early investor in companies like ClassPass and Bumble.

Yet unfinished business gnawed at her. “Music is a place that makes me feel like I’m home, and fusion music makes me feel like I’m being seen,” she says. Acharia spoke to other labels last year about the idea for 5 Junction, but Kyncl personally convinced her to bring the project to WMG. She will work closely with Warner Records CEO Aaron Bay-Schuck and COO Tom Corson, as well as GM Jurgen Grebner, who steered international marketing at Interscope for over 20 years, and Alfonso Perez-Soto, who served as WMG’s emerging markets leader before recently becoming executive vp of corporate development.

Although Acharia was removed from the major-label world for years, some of its most prominent executives believe she’s the perfect steward for this ocean-spanning endeavor. Corson describes her as “a powerful force who is extremely well-connected across the world. We hit it off from the jump, and we’re thrilled to be in business with her.” Kyncl says that, if he were to describe the “ideal entrepreneur,” that person would resemble Acharia. “You have a vision, you’re strategic about it and you won’t stop until you win,” he says. “She has it. It makes absolute sense for us to partner with her, and she’ll make us better by pushing us.”

From left: Fatehi, Acharia and King.

Harsh Jani

Her ties to Kyncl aside, Acharia says that WMG made the most sense as a home for 5 Junction because the label group is “way ahead” in the scene. Since WMG created Warner Music India five years ago, the label has partnered with Diljit Dosanjh, a Bollywood superstar with 25 million Instagram followers who has headlined North American arenas; Karan Aujla, a former songwriter turned singer/rapper/YouTube behemoth; and Kushagra, a 20-year-old indie-pop newcomer whose single “Finding Her” is currently one of India’s biggest streaming hits.

When Jay Mehta became managing director of Warner Music India in April 2020, he was a team of one; now, the label has 34 employees. Part of that growth had to do with timing, as the market quickly expanded globally. Last decade, “India was dominated by Indian streaming services, which did not have a global footprint,” Mehta explains. “Spotify launched in India in 2018, and it took until 2021, 2022 for them to become the leaders [in the country]. We needed Spotify and YouTube to have massive presences in India in order to take artists global.”

Acharia also points out that subtle cultural shifts in North America helped fuel opportunities. “Think about all the foreign-language content on Netflix and other streaming platforms that people have watched — especially during COVID, where people were stuck at home,” she says. “And then, with vertical video, people are watching things with subtitles all the time … Everything affects each other. We’re more used to hearing foreign languages, so we’re more OK to listen to it in our music.”

Harsh Jani

Harsh Jani

At 5 Junction, Acharia will work closely with Mehta’s Warner Music India team, which has utilized streaming data to identify artists who can transcend international borders and songwriting camps to supply them with global hits. Fatehi, a Toronto native of Moroccan descent who moved to India and became a marquee Bollywood act, signed a deal with WMG in early 2024 to help her level up as a singer, dancer and actor. “The larger goal was always to go global, to let the whole world know my story,” she says. When she met Acharia, Fatehi told her that she wanted to become a cross-cultural entertainer along the lines of Jennifer Lopez, and Acharia told her, “Yes, let’s do it together.”

Fatehi says she has never met anyone more persuasive than Acharia. “I feel like our hungers align,” she says. “It’s hard to take a vision and sell it to someone else, because most people don’t have an attention span to listen to you for more than five minutes. But when [Anjula] opens her mouth and starts her pitch, you somehow have FOMO — you feel like you’re going to miss out if you’re not paying attention.”

In January, Fatehi released the Jason Derulo collaboration “Snake,” a thumping dance track built around East Asian melodies. It has earned 18.5 million official on-demand streams globally, according to Luminate; one month after its release, Aujla was featured on “Tell Me,” a OneRepublic collaboration that has earned 28.8 million global streams.

More than two decades after Jay-Z and Panjabi MC linked up, Acharia still believes these types of collaborations are key for breaking South Asian artists in North America. “The strategy that I had 15 years ago was cross-pollination, but we didn’t have the infrastructure to support that,” she says. Now creative borders are easier to cross. For instance, Fatehi and Derulo met up in Morocco to film a music video for “Snake” that combined hip-hop and Bollywood choreography. And after King recruited Nick Jonas for a new version of the former’s smash “Maan Meri Jaan” in 2023, King made a surprise appearance during the Jonas Brothers’ performance at Lollapalooza India in 2024 to perform it, a “cinematic” moment that he says he still can’t believe actually happened.

Harsh Jani

At the same time that Western artists are paying more attention to India as a touring market — Coldplay performed in the country for the first time in January, grossing $30.5 million across five shows in Mumbai and Ahmedabad, according to Billboard Boxscore — South Asian artists are more clearly identifying North American territories where thousands of fans will show up to their shows. Acharia name-checks New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Austin, but also says that Canadian cities have demonstrated “huge” ticket demand. After Dosanjh scored his first top 10 album in Canada with 2023’s Ghost, his Dil-Luminati tour last year became the highest-grossing North American tour by a Punjabi music artist in history, thanks in part to sold-out stadium shows at Vancouver’s BC Place and Toronto’s Rogers Centre.

Perez-Soto sees Toronto, where the metro area had a South Asian population of more than 1.1 million as of 2021, as a crucial gateway for the rest of North America. “South Asian music through Toronto, like Latin music was through Miami, has established an important bridge between the local origin of the music and the second generation,” he says. “They have this hybrid vision of culture, where things are getting mixed up and mutually enriched.”

Kyncl has kept WMG focused on these macro-trends for years. “It’s not like we’re just starting,” he says. “It’s just that Anjula is adding an additional element, which is bringing talent here.” Under her guidance, Fatehi is spending most of April in the recording studio and will issue the follow-up to “Snake” by the end of the month, with a mix of releases aimed at Eastern and Western markets throughout the year. Meanwhile, King says he is “working on an EP and some collaborations” to follow his January single “Stay,” in addition to multiple Bollywood projects.

Mehta believes that an Indian artist will make an impact on the U.S. mainstream charts in 2025. “We saw it with Hanumankind, on the back of a viral moment,” he says, referencing the Indian rapper’s 2024 track “Big Dawgs,” which exploded on TikTok and peaked at No. 23 on the Billboard Hot 100. “But we want to make a consistent way of bringing a lot of these artists onto the charts. The U.S. is extremely competitive, but if we get the right sound representing the culture and the right artist, with Anjula’s strengths, we should be able to make something big happen.”

Acharia knows this will take time, but for her, the personal stakes are worth the investment. She was once told that Desi Hits wouldn’t last; now, 5 Junction could define her legacy. “It’s something that I started, and I want to finish it,” she says. And for his part, Iovine is proud that the world has finally caught up to her vision.

“I’m not surprised at all at any of her success,” Iovine says, “and I’m glad she’s doing this now.”

This story appears in the April 19, 2025, issue of Billboard.

Billboard

At the beginning of the year, Gracie Abrams found herself in a rare bind. For one of the first times in her life, she says, “I felt like I had nothing to say.” The 25-year-old musician had scheduled a week to spend at Long Pond Studio working on new music with her longtime collaborator, Aaron […]

Erykah Badu remembers her last moments of normalcy. The generational talent who changed the course of R&B and hip-hop with her home-cooked neo-soul has never truly been “normal,” of course. But before Badu was the futuristic stylist we know her to be, she was just a young woman from Dallas. One who traveled to New York during the paralyzing North American blizzard of 1996 to finish a debut album she hoped would be good enough to allow her to make another one. “That’s how I met New York. Like, ‘Oh, you cold!’ ” she says in the much more agreeable climate of her hometown. “I was like, ‘OK, if this is what I got to do — then this is what I got to do.’ ”

Despite the frigid weather, the then-25-year-old Badu found a warm and welcoming community in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene neighborhood. In 1992, Entertainment Weekly correctly noted the area was the “red-hot center of a national black arts renaissance.” Chris Rock called it home, as did Gil Scott-Heron. Digable Planets copped a spot and recorded its second album, Blowout Comb, as a love letter to the hood. Badu moved into a cozy apartment above Mo’s Bar & Lounge, right around the way from one of her favorite spots, Brooklyn Moon Café. Spike Lee’s 40 Acres and a Mule — the studio behind Do the Right Thing, Malcolm X and Jungle Fever — was close by. “[I was] right in the center of Blackness,” she remembers. “Dreads, headwraps and people who looked like me who I didn’t know existed. I felt like I belonged there. I met people who felt the way I felt, and that’s when I knew I wasn’t alone in my journey or quest to find out, ‘Who am I?’ ”

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To answer that question, Badu would need to enlist her own spirit guides both within and outside of the music industry. One of the most memorable was a woman named Queen Afua, who became a mentor of sorts for young Badu. In addition to helping Badu with her holistic journey, Afua “became my family away from Dallas. She communicated with me like a mother.” But to keep her profile as low as possible, Badu didn’t tell Afua why she was in the Big Apple: “I didn’t tell anyone in New York anything. I just wanted to live.” And so, she lived. When she wasn’t kicking it in Fort Greene, Badu was taking classes at Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater taught by dance legend Joan Peters. She took a Kemetic language course, because why not? “A lot of things were happening, and they all became a part of who I am,” Badu says. “You know, as Erica in America.”

Badu constantly told herself to be as “regular as possible,” because she knew the album she was trudging to Battery Studios in Midtown Manhattan to work on with a group of musicians who would go on to become legends in their own right — people like James Poyser and Questlove from Philadelphia’s The Roots — was going “to take this motherf–ker by storm.”

Jai Lennard

The album, Baduizm, did just that. It debuted at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 and ruled the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. Buoyed by the meditative smash hit “On & On,” Baduizm helped usher in what became known as neo-soul: a type of R&B that built on the traditions and stylings of the past while breathing new life and energy into the genre. While most neo-soul tracks sampled or interpolated older soul songs, “On & On,” with its rolling bass and booming drums, was wholly original. It felt like a completely fresh idea (and Badu was full of them) but also something familiar and comfortable ­— the delicate balance most artists work their entire lives trying to strike.

“[I’d] never seen someone just full of a bunch of ideas,” Questlove recounted in a 2024 interview with Poyser. “She had a lot of choruses ready. She was the first person I met that instantly had a clever chorus ready in the stash.” For the album’s third single, “Other Side of the Game,” the Roots drummer recalled that Badu came in with the idea to rework the famous chorus to Inner Circle’s “Bad Boys Reply.” Even more impressive, he remembered, was that the version of the song that made it onto the album was essentially the first take that was committed to tape: “I thought, ‘Oh, this girl is going to make it.’ ”

Dressed in an oversize sweatshirt and sweatpants with a warm-looking knitted cap, today Badu comes across every bit as enchanting as she’s made out to be. Sitting in the back room of South Dallas’ Furndware Studios, she speaks with a calm directness that you would expect from a shaman or elementary school teacher. Every question elicits a thoughtful pause and an even more thoughtful answer. When I ask Badu about making versus performing music, for example, she goes into a deep rumination about the focus needed to create great music. “I want to focus, I want to be in the moment of the foreplay. Creating the music. The tragedy. The love. The experience of the whole thing,” she says before exhaling. “Then I go somewhere else after this is done. This is a movie and the studio audience is cracking up and crying and s–t… I hope that answers that question.”

Badu makes you feel as if you’re the most important person in the world when she’s speaking to you. It’s a skill many successful people have, but few can also make you feel like the luckiest — as if she’s letting you, and only you, in on a cosmic secret. That may owe in part to the spiritual tangents she sometimes goes on when answering questions. Or it may simply be the attentiveness she offers in conversation. She says she has learned that the way to become successful — and to maintain that success — is to be healthy, present and aware, and to never stop learning.

Born Erica Abi White in Dallas, Badu didn’t always aspire to “make it.” She simply wanted to create art like most of her family had done. She grew up with her grandmother, mother and uncles, in what she describes as “a house of music lovers and collectors.” There was music in every room — literally. “There were records from wall to wall, a radio in the bathroom that was on the local FM soul station,” she recalls. Everyone was allowed to have their own corner to express their musical tastes. “My uncles would be in the back listening to funk. They were into Bootsy [Collins] and George Duke and Stanley Clarke. My mother was more into the sirens — the Chaka Khans, the Phoebe Snows, the Deniece Williamses, The Emotions. My uncle, who’s a rebel, was into Prince and Pink Floyd and Three Dog Night,” she says. “I had a variety to pull from.”

Erykah Badu photographed on February 7, 2025 at Mars Hill Farm in Ferris, Texas.

Jai Lennard

Badu immersed herself in everything artistic Dallas had to offer a young person. When she was in elementary school, she began taking classes at the Dallas Theater Center, as well as the Martin Luther King Jr. Community Center, where she would sing and dance and perform in plays. Badu and her younger sister, Koko, also frequented The Black Academy of Arts and Letters, where her mother and godmother volunteered. TBAAL’s founder, Curtis King, recalls seeing the “it thing” in Badu from an early age.

Badu went to Louisiana’s Grambling State University to study theater but left in 1993 and returned to Dallas before she graduated. She planned to pursue music full time — but since dreams don’t come true overnight, Badu found herself working a series of odd jobs to support herself while she worked with her cousin Robert “Free” Bradford to record her demo, Country Cousins. The two would perform around Dallas as a duo — she would sing and he would rap. But even with the 19-song project, Badu couldn’t pay a label to take her on. She says she auditioned for everyone — Sony, Priority, Bad Boy, So So Def — but didn’t catch a break until D’Angelo’s then-manager, Kedar Massenburg, saw her perform at South by Southwest and received her demo. He immediately signed her to his fledging imprint, Kedar Entertainment.

“As soon as I heard ‘On & On,’ I knew that I had to get involved,” Massenburg told Billboard in 2017. “The thing that struck me immediately was the beginning, because Erykah had used a beat in the intro that Daddy-O, a member of a group I managed called Stetsasonic, had created: Audio Two’s ‘Top Billin.’ ”

Country Cousins was the foundation of what became Baduizm, and Badu’s debut cemented not only her career but also the neo-soul scene that had been developing. “I think Tony! Toni! Toné! kind of opened the door, D’Angelo took it to the next level in terms of edginess, and Erykah solidified it,” Massenburg said. “That’s what Baduizm did. You’re saying, ‘I don’t need to wear these kinds of clothes or look this kind of way, this is my “-izm.” ’ The only thing that dates it is the term ‘neo-soul’ — maybe that’s the issue. It places it at a time when that term meant a certain thing. Take away the term, and it stands with the best of the artists that are out here today.”

Jai Lennard

You would think, with the impact she has had on R&B and hip-hop, that Badu would have dropped more than five albums over her 28-year career. But nope — just five studio sets, a live album and a mixtape. Granted, they’re all classics and helped either introduce a new sound or popularize a new style of working. Take 2008’s New Amerykah Part One (4th World War), which was recorded mainly on laptops with Apple’s GarageBand software, with Badu emailing sessions and files back and forth with producers. At the time, it was a pretty novel idea to forego the studio for your bedroom — only new, cash-strapped artists were doing that. Badu helped bring the practice to the mainstream — just one of many examples of her being aware of the winds of change before most of her peers.

That same awareness inspired her to launch her label, Control Freq, in 2005. At the time, Badu said it was her attempt at making a “profitable home for artists, with fair contracts that will return ownership of the music to the artists after a period of time.” The first artist signed to the label was Jay Electronica, the father of Badu’s third child. “I didn’t develop him at all. I just wanted to be near his greatness,” Badu says. “He needed to be heard and I had a platform. I wasn’t interested in building an artist from scratch. I was interested in artists who were building their own platforms.”

When it comes to her own music, Badu is less interested in what she puts on wax than in what she puts forth onstage. “I tour eight months out of the year for the past 25 years,” she says emphatically. “That’s what I do. I am a performance artist. I am not a recording artist. I come from the theater. It’s the immediate reaction between you and the audience and the immediate feeling. The point where you become one living, breathing organism with people. That’s what I live for. It’s my therapy. And theirs, too. We’re in it together. And I like the idea that it happens only once.”

Unlike most performance artists, however, Badu doesn’t create her music with the live aspect in mind. Once she decides to perform a song, she begins to re-create it for the stage. “It’s like, ‘OK, now this is one arena. Now, what are you going to do with it in here?’ ” (One of her most popular songs, “Tyrone,” was only ever released as a live rendition, on her 1997 Live album.) The results speak for themselves. Badu — this year’s Women in Music Icon — has emerged as one of the premier performers of her generation.

In 2015, while on an apparent hiatus, Badu released a remix of Drake’s gargantuan smash “Hotline Bling.” Produced by the Dallas-based Zach Witness — who first connected with Badu after she heard a remix he did of her 2000 song “Bag Lady” and reached out to him — “Cel U Lar Device” was posted to SoundCloud without much explanation.

The track became the lead single for her mixtape — and most recent project — 2015’s But You Caint Use My Phone (a nod to “Tyrone”), which she recorded in less than two weeks with Witness in his home studio. The tape centered on a theme of cellphone use and addiction, with Badu putting her spin on a few other popular phone-based songs like Usher’s “U Don’t Have To Call” and New Edition’s “Mr. Telephone Man.”

Since then, Badu has popped up here and there. She says she only collaborates with people whose music she really enjoys. Dram featured her on his debut album in 2016. She jumped on a track for Teyana Taylor’s self-titled album in 2020. She lent her vocals to a Jamie xx song that came out in January. And at the 2025 Grammy Awards, she won the best melodic rap performance statue for a collaboration with Rapsody, “3:AM.” “It snuck up on me!” she says. “I remember collaborating with [producer] S1 and Rapsody and we had such a good time promoting the song and I just felt like it was all for her basically. She worked very hard to get to this place.”

Jai Lennard

She still loves rap, although she doesn’t follow it as much as she used to and now experiences a lot of it through her children: Seven, 28; Puma, 21; and Mars, 16. (She says they also have attempted to make music, which is not surprising considering their fathers are all rap legends: André 3000, The D.O.C. and Electronica, respectively.)

“[The thing I like about rap right now] is the same thing I liked about rap when I first met it,” she says. “Rap is the people. Hip-hop is the people. It’s the folks. It’s the tribe. I have the luxury of experiencing having children who I watch grow up and love and encourage very much, and I cannot separate them when I see artists who are that age coming up. That’s how they feel. They are continuing the tradition.”

Badu may say she’s not as tuned in as she used to be, but she’s clearly keeping tabs on what’s hot right now. She’s been hard at work on her first studio album in 15 years, which is being produced solely by The Alchemist, the hip-hop journeyman who has had a resurgence as of late thanks to his work with the Buffalo, N.Y.-based Griselda crew and artists like Larry June. Badu posted a teaser of the project on Instagram to an exuberant response from fans who’ve been damn near begging her to drop something new and show the generations of artists who’ve had her pinned to the center of their mood boards how it’s supposed to be done.

The album has been taking up most of her time; she says she can’t wait until she’s done. And whatever time that isn’t occupied by her family and nonmusical interests — such as her cannabis strain collaboration with brand Cookies called That Badu — goes toward keeping herself in the best mental, emotional and physical shape possible and making sure she’s set for the future. “When I was building my house, I was making sure that I was building ramps for when I was elderly and couldn’t walk by myself,” the now-54-year-old says. “When I do my workouts, I do workouts that are conducive for picking up groceries and grandchildren and things like that.”

That’s not to say she isn’t having fun. Another of her nonmusical hobbies is car collecting. Badu, whose grandmother bought her toy cars instead of dolls when she asked for the latter as gifts, lights up when asked to run down what’s currently in her collection: “I get happy when talking about it.” There’s a baby blue ’67 Lincoln Continental with suicide doors and a chandelier in the back (“Original interior, original white wall tires, original radio”); a 1989 Land Rover Defender; a 1971 Sting Ray Corvette (“Matte black, neon yellow stripe. It looks like the Batmobile”). A collector since she was 21 years old, her first car was a 1965 convertible Super Beetle. “Before I was Erykah Badu the artist, that was my hobby that I loved.” Her uncle Mike, the one who was into funk music, is also into cars and keeps and maintains some of hers; the rest are tucked away in a Dallas garage.

It all sounds surprisingly normal for a music superstar of Badu’s stature, and that’s just what she likes about it. And it’s the same reason why, after all her success, she has remained in South Dallas. “It was very hard for me to be away because this is where I want to be,” she says. “I wanted to come here and build. This is where everybody is. I’m five generations in Dallas. This is my place. It’s my home.”

This story appears in the March 22, 2025, issue of Billboard.

The show was, unequivocally, going off.
In time with the beat, columns of fire blasted from a complicated and expensive-looking stage setup as a litany of dance hits blasted through the speakers of Los Angeles’ Kia Forum, where more than 15,000 people and their approximately 30,000 ears were gathered to hear the music.

Drunk girls traded compliments in line for the bathroom while staffers trying to prevent fire hazards cajoled people to dance in their seats instead of the aisles. It was a proper arena rager, a de facto badge of success for any artist, but particularly so in the world of dance music.

At the center of it all, John Summit — tanned, smiling, his shirt unbuttoned to a chest level that suggested a regular workout routine — threw up heart hands while manning the cockpit of CDJs before him. It was Nov. 16, 2024, the final evening of the producer’s sold-out three-night run at the Forum, shows executed by a 130-person team working overtime. It was just one of the very big moments of Summit’s biggest year to date, and while the set wasn’t even done yet, in his mind it was already over.

“I got too comfortable by the end,” he reflects three months later, “and I was like, ‘This show is done. This is the last one.’ And not because it wasn’t great. I think it was excellent. But I don’t want to write the same movie twice.”

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John Summit performs at Billboard Presents THE STAGE at SXSW at Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park in Austin on March 15. Get your tickets here.

This sentiment embodies three essential truths about Summit. First and most obviously, that the 30-year-old Illinois native has accomplished quite a lot since emerging from the froth of internet buzz over the last five years. Second, that Summit possesses an almost strangely intense drive, a kind of stubborn single-mindedness that propels him forward even when the thing he has spent a year working on is still happening around him. And third: Summit’s tendency to most often describe his life not in terms of music but cinema. His big shows and capital B bangers are, for example, “big-budget projects, like Marvel,” whereas his smaller, clubbier sets “are A24,” he says, referencing the lauded indie studio. He compares the beginning of his sold-out Madison Square Garden show last summer to an action film, calling the pyro-heavy moment “basically me blowing up onstage. It was very Michael Bay-esque.”

Surveying the public-facing landscape of Summit’s life helps to explain his tendency to process it all in leading-man terms. Through an alchemy of talent, will, hard work and smart decision-making, Summit and his team have pulled off one of dance music’s rarest feats: becoming a hard-ticket juggernaut with a signature sound, big-ass hits and intergenerational appeal.

At the Garden, says Wasserman’s Daisy Hoffman, who represents Summit alongside Ben Shprits, “older adult fans” intermingled with younger ones. “I have 35-year-old friends with kids who are doing a girls’ trip to Vail [Colo.] for his show there, while my 25-year-old sister is following his every move on TikTok.”

A DJ achieving this kind of broad appeal is, today, a bit like spotting a snow leopard in the wild. “It’s very rare,” Shprits says. “It is extremely rare.”

OFY top, Lost ‘N Found pants, Tercero Jewelry necklace and rings.

Ysa PĂŠrez

But it’s also not a fluke: Summit is a confident and adorable hustler with high standards and an intense Midwestern work ethic. “I’m delusional,” he says on a recent balmy Wednesday afternoon in Miami, where he moved to in 2020 to try and make it as a DJ. “I thought the first track I ever made was amazing.”

Since his first release in 2017, he has steadily attracted other believers, with his sprawling business now populated by managers, agents, accountants, label operators, radio pluggers, marketers, production designers, social media experts and the videographer who silently and ceaselessly captures footage as Summit shows me around Miami, a city where he has not only made it, but where he now avoids “super-glamorous spots where I feel like people are just staring at me the whole time.”

Dance superstardom has changed him. Whereas his social channels used to be plastered with drunken shenanigans, Summit now posts a lot about exercising. Hours before we meet, he shares an image of a yoga mat on the balcony of the waterfront condo he bought two years ago. While we chat, he talks about his need for consistent sleep (he tucks in at midnight and wakes up at seven) and more than once references his “personal growth journey.” But while Summit is Evolving with a capital E, his tenacity remains unaltered. After releasing his debut album, Comfort in Chaos, last July, he’s already at work on its follow-up. This summer, he’ll also headline festivals including Movement, Lightning in a Bottle and Bonnaroo; launch an Ibiza residency; and play shows in Australia, Europe and beyond.

“I’m hustling harder than I’ve ever hustled before,” he says, his Chicago accent strong. “The shows are only getting bigger and not just bigger, but better. The team is growing. My record label is growing. I’m working on a second album already, whereas I think most dance artists, especially house artists, don’t even do albums. Every year is crazier and crazier. It would be stupid to slow down when it’s snowballing.”

And yet it all occasionally leaves his head spinning. For example, Summit compares spending the holidays in his native Naperville, Ill., to the end of The Lord of the Rings, when Frodo Baggins returns to the Shire after risking life and limb to destroy the One Ring and finds that while his idyllic homeland is the same as when he left it, he — fundamentally transformed by his quest — is not. “I’ve had the craziest life, toured the whole world, had many adventures and late nights, got into some bad situations,” Summit says. “Then I come back home and everything is the exact same.”

One can see how opening Christmas presents in your parents’ living room in the suburbs might seem surreal after playing for hundreds of thousands of people across multiple continents. But it was in Naperville and nearby Chicago where Summit — then a “kind of nerdy runner” born John Schuster — was first exposed to dance music. It happened while seeing deadmau5 at Lollapalooza in 2011, an experience Summit, then 16, has equated to a sort of spiritual awakening. His subsequent journeys through SoundCloud were exacerbated by a high school love interest. “At first, I was just making music to impress my girlfriend at the time,” he says. “She liked all these DJs, and I was like, ‘I can f–king do this.’ ”

OFY top, Lost ‘N Found pants, Rick Owens shoes, Tercero Jewelry necklace and rings.

Ysa PĂŠrez

Summit got serious about DJ’ing and producing while a student at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. By 2017, he had graduated with a master’s degree in accounting and was working at Ernst & Young while making music in his off-hours. (And, he admits, often during work hours, too.) He sent “dozens of demos” to a flurry of labels, focusing on esteemed U.K. imprints like Toolroom and Defected Records, which specialize in the house and tech house styles he was making.

“It’s no different than applying for 100 jobs when you’re out of college,” Summit says matter-of-factly of sending out demos. Eventually, a few small labels replied with feedback on how he could improve, and by 2018, they had signed a few of his tracks. By this time, Summit was in touch with a young manager named Holt Harmon, who was working with Summit on the release of a track he had made with an artist Harmon was then working with. The pair clicked.

“I had a call with Holt about, like, ‘How is this getting distributed? What’s the marketing strategy?’ I went very exec mode on him,” Summit says. “I think he was like, ‘Oh, this kid’s not just good at music. He gets it and he’s not lazy.’ I thought the same about him.”

Summit became the third artist signed to Metatone, the management company Harmon co-founded alongside Parker Cohen in 2018. But as things picked up for Summit, the pandemic hit. By now, Summit had been fired from Ernst & Young and was back living with his parents. But what might have seemed like a roadblock became something else.

“People saw the pandemic as a time to take their foot off the gas,” Shprits says. “And here you’ve got a 20-something guy on the verge of taking the next step in his career who saw it as an opportunity to do the opposite.”

In the basement, Summit made music and was extremely online, posting production tutorials, doing livestreams and winning people over with what Shprits calls his “unfiltered” personality. (“I would pay $500 to slap a warm bag of wine at a music festival right now,” Summit tweeted in May 2020, the deep days of the pandemic.) By the end of 2020, he had gone from livestreaming from Naperville to playing a b2b set with Gorgon City broadcast from a Chicago rooftop, racking up millions of views and likes along the way with this, as well as other self-deprecating, unapologetic and funny content. You couldn’t help but root for the guy.

Around this time, Summit moved to America’s dance music capital, Miami, with the goal of playing an extended set at the influential nightclub Space. “People didn’t see me as a serious DJ,” he says. “They saw me as someone who might have blown up on TikTok or something. Then I was doing these eight- to 10-hour sets of pretty underground music, not even playing a big vocal record until four or five hours in, kind of just proving like, ‘Yeah, I’m a f–king DJ.’ That was my version of taking on a very serious role.”

The method acting worked. When clubs reopened across the United States, Summit was suddenly selling out 500-capacity rooms in far-flung cities like Tempe, Ariz., often in seconds. He and his team focused on playing as much as they could, wherever they could, and venues eventually got bigger as the social media reach grew. His single and EP releases were largely house and tech house tracks, with his output helping propel the latter subgenre to increasingly bigger audiences, particularly as Summit experimented with bigger and more vocal-forward records, the kind that typically have maximum crossover potential.

His watershed moment came when he released “Where You Are,” a collaboration with power-lunged British singer-songwriter Hayla, in March 2023. “Before putting it out, I was like, ‘This is going to f–k up my entire career because this is a headliner, main-stage song,’ ” he says. “Very few DJs had become successful in the pop lane. It was like, ‘Am I ready for this challenge?’ Then I was like, ‘F–k it. Let’s do it.’ ”

“Where You Are” spent 26 weeks on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart; now has 298.7 million on-demand official global streams, according to Luminate; and was selected as a favorite song of 2023 by another Chicagoland resident, Barack Obama. By December 2023, Summit sold out Los Angeles’ BMO Stadium, moving 21,700 tickets and grossing $1.7 million, according to Billboard Boxscore.

“Where You Are” and other subsequent belters from Comfort in Chaos have, along with Summit’s general presence in the scene, agitated the dance world’s perpetual push-pull between the commercial and underground, a turf war that has long found artists wanting to play the biggest shows and have the biggest hits without losing the credibility and cool factor of dance’s less overtly capitalist sectors. But Summit wants to do both.

“John’s been very vocal about wanting to bring the underground to a large scale while bringing a production level that no one’s ever seen with this style of music,” Shprits says. “That’s always been the guiding light.”

But even if you’re playing music with underground origins, it’s not necessarily accurate to call yourself an underground artist while playing from atop a laser-shooting platform at the center of a sold-out arena. This is why Summit created Experts Only, the name of both the label on which he, in partnership with Darkroom Records, releases his own and other artists’ music and a party series where he plays lesser-known music (“I feel like I have to be very on the forefront with the records,” he says) for smaller crowds in tighter spaces.

“I look at John Summit and Experts Only as two different things,” Summit says. “John Summit is this grand display, a huge-budget production that shows my art and music from the album, whereas Experts Only is a party brand where me and DJ [friends] do cooler underground cuts … You hear so many artists who blew up that are like, ‘I hate playing my big song every night.’ They wish they could play more experimental stuff. I’m getting the best of both worlds.”

Doing both has broadened Summit’s appeal. The underground thing, Shprits says, is “generally attractive to an older demographic that’s experienced with electronic music. Then he has this amazing ability to craft songs that attract your high school and college demographic. Take all of that and then combine it with the personality, the packaging and the A&R’ing from the management and label side, it’s like the perfect big bang.”

And yet, Summit questions what the “hipster snob” John Schuster might think of it all. He recalls firing off “hypercritical” tweets at main-stage dance giants back in the EDM era; he preferred the heady vibes of Michigan’s beloved dance/jam festival Electric Forest and deep cuts like Shiba San’s 2014 house classic, “Okay.” “Now I’m here in those same shoes getting as much s–t talked about me. I think that’s maybe why I can get through it without getting too offended, because that was me doing the s–t-talking.”

CUBEL x The Room jacket and pants, Lost ‘N Found tee, Rick Owens shoes, Tercero Jewelry rings.

Ysa PĂŠrez

But when you read most every social media comment, as Summit says he does, the ability to laugh off insults is helped by what he calls “a good supporting cast.” (He screenshots particularly egregious remarks and sends them to the inner circle for diffusion.) Taking a team approach to his career “is way less lonely,” with every person on the team not only bringing “a Swiss Army knife” of abilities, but together creating a perpetual group hang that’s the antidote to the cycle of loneliness, depression and addiction that has historically plagued dance artists.

Still, he is John Summit of the John Summit project, and his vision is specific. Here in Miami, he has ideas for how he wants to be photographed and filmed. He likes a lot of prep and knowing what the plan is. He’s agreeable and charming. You could also call him bossy — or just someone who knows what he wants.

“For better or for worse, I challenge people around me as much as possible to be at their greatest,” he says. “I’m ever-evolving, and everyone has to be ever-evolving around me.” Cohen says that among the team, Summit is often referred as “the third manager.” Shprits acknowledges that “at many times, John has challenged us to understand where he was going with this and to meet him.”

Summit isn’t quite sure where the drive comes from. “I was fortunate to have a very normal upbringing,” he says, and his parents (his father is a commercial airline pilot and his mother a real estate agent) “are like, ‘You’re doing great. You don’t have to keep pushing.’ I don’t come from an incredibly successful artistic family. There’s no mounting pressure.” At least, not from outside sources.

“This is one of the most competitive industries in the world,” he continues. “I can’t let off the gas because the second I do, someone else is going to steam ahead. I’m going to try my best and try to be the best. Otherwise, what’s the point?”

So, for the foreseeable future, Summit shall keep gunning it. After Comfort in Chaos hit No. 39 on the Billboard 200, he’s now at work on a follow-up album that he wants to be “bigger and better.” While he didn’t get any 2025 Grammy nominations after campaigning for them, he says that just gives him “something to strive for.” And while dance music isn’t even a genre that necessitates albums, Summit sees them as meaningful: “I look at some of the greatest artists over the last generations, where album after album, they try to outdo themselves, reinvent themselves.” He takes cues not only from musicians but high-achieving athletes and, naturally, actors, calling Timothée Chalamet’s recent run “f–king incredible” and particularly inspiring.

For the next album, he’s interested in releasing a short movie alongside it. A recent rewatch of the 2014 film Whiplash inspired him to buy a drum kit and, maybe, play percussion on some of his new music. While he “shot my shot” with pop stars like Charli xcx and Dua Lipa by tweeting at them asking to work together (no collaborations have resulted), he says working with this type of artist “is not needed in my career,” given the strong roster of vocalists with “raw talent” like Hayla, Julia Church and more that he has surrounded himself with. He regularly brings out these vocalists during big shows and “f–king loves it” when they get a huge crowd reaction.

Plus, having tried working with a few pop stars, he finds bumping into their limited schedules “very diva-like. And as a diva myself,” he says with a laugh, “there’s only room for one of us.”

OFY top and tee, Lost ‘N Found x Levi’s pants, Rick Owens x Dr. Martens shoes, Tercero Jewelry rings.

Ysa PĂŠrez

As writing gets underway, he’s also finding that he has grown up a bit since the days when his tagline was “My life is a bender.” (“My bender era walked so brat could run,” he tweets while we have lunch; the sentiment gets 2,500 likes before the plates are cleared.) Comfort in Chaos explored deeper topics than partying, and he says making it was a huge leap in his maturation. A song like his 2022 “In Chicago” (sample lyric: “I’m drunk, I’m high and I’m in Chicago”) “is basically like LMFAO,” he says. “It’s like my ‘Party Rock [Anthem].’ ” Comfort in Chaos, on the other hand, was largely about love and longing. When asked about this subject matter, he acknowledges that “I’m a lover boy” but demurs when asked to expand, saying only, “I tell it through the music, not in interviews.” (If anyone wants to read the tea leaves, the lyrics of Summit’s most recent song, the moody indie dance track “Focus,” inquire, “How’d we get so lost inside of this room?/Watching you turn into someone I never knew/I remember love, but it’s slipping out of view.”)

While Summit works out these big feelings in his new music, he’ll also spend the rest of 2025 headlining major U.S. festivals and touring the world; he and his team are particularly focused on international expansion this year. Outside of Ibiza, he says “there’s really no money” in international shows, but adds that revenue isn’t the point: “I’m young and hungry, and I want to showcase my art with the world.”

It’s all a wild ride, a summer popcorn blockbuster, a journey to Mordor and back. It’s the kind of stuff Summit sometimes thinks about after the workday ends, when “I take an edible and think, ‘Holy s–t, this world is crazy.’ But then I wake up in the morning, snap out of it and get back to it.”

This story appears in the March 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.

The show was, unequivocally, going off. In time with the beat, columns of fire blasted from a complicated and expensive-looking stage setup as a litany of dance hits blasted through the speakers of Los Angeles’ Kia Forum, where more than 15,000 people and their approximately 30,000 ears were gathered to hear the music. Drunk girls […]

On an overcast winter afternoon in McAllen, Texas, all six members of Grupo Frontera are huddled around an oversize white box, staring gleefully at its contents. They peel back the tissue paper wrapping to reveal a present their stylist has gifted them just a few days shy of Christmas — a mound of plush Polo Ralph Lauren bathrobes, one for each member, with a brassy statement stitched onto the back: “B–ch, I got a Grammy!”
The members of the norteño and cumbia band — which won the Latin Grammy for best norteño album in 2024 — are standing inside their palatial Frontera HQ in McAllen, a home that they purchased last year. Built in the mid-2000s, the sprawling estate is a very particular vision of turn-of-the-21st-century luxury (see: the Tuscan kitchen replete with dark wood cabinetry). A minimalist home recording studio, where the band has laid down several tracks, sits just past the outdoor path wending around the pool and hot tub, in a yard expansive enough to park their fleet of tour buses.

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Privacy and practicality alike spurred the band to centralize its operations here. When its star began rising about three years ago, after its cover of Colombian pop-rockers Morat’s “No Se Va” surged to life-altering virality on TikTok, Grupo Frontera would frequently record music in this South Texas enclave of the Rio Grande Valley where its members grew up and still reside — until some locals figured out where the group was recording and started showing up to the studio unannounced. “People would deadass just open the door, walk in and listen to whatever we were recording,” says frontman Adelaido “Payo” Solís in between sips of a briny michelada. “They would just wait for us to finish. Then we came out, we saw people, and we were like, ‘Hi?’ ”

Grupo Frontera will perform at Billboard Presents THE STAGE at SXSW at Moody Ampitheater at Waterloo Park in Austin on March 14. Get your tickets here.

Crucially, the house is decidedly “party-ful,” as Julian Peña Jr., the band’s affable percussionist and hype man, puts it. Grupo Frontera has held a tequila-fueled carne asada (a barbecue hang) or two here, including a baby shower for accordionist Juan Javier Cantú, who recently welcomed a daughter with his wife. The group — which also includes drummer Carlos Guerrero, bassist Brian Ortega and guitarist/bajo quinto player Beto Acosta — hopes to eventually open up the space for visiting collaborators and friends to crash there. But given that the house is still barely furnished, those plans are on hold for the moment. There aren’t many places to sit, save for a few folding chairs and tables here and there; only a handful of the home’s six bedrooms have mattresses in them propped up against walls. Tellingly, the sole piece of art inside is a framed photograph of the band mugging with superstar Bad Bunny — who collaborated with Grupo Frontera on its Billboard Hot 100 smash “un x100to,” peaking at No. 5 on the chart — splattered with globs of bright paint.

Interior decorating was admittedly low on the band’s priority list in 2024 — a year in which Grupo Frontera released its punchy set Jugando a Que No Pasa Nada, which reached the top 10 of the Top Latin Albums chart. An ambitious tour around the United States, Mexico and one date in Spain followed at amphitheaters and arenas, with shows featuring pyrotechnic flourishes and stretching about two hours. Somehow, Grupo Frontera also found time to release Mala Mía, a joint EP with fellow música mexicana stalwarts and collaborators Fuerza Regida, before the year ended. Then in late November, the group won its first-ever Latin Grammy for its 2023 debut album, El Comienzo.

Brian Ortega

Jasmine Archie

In the three brief years it has been together, Grupo Frontera has transformed from a cohort playing covers at quinceañeras into a Mexican American boy band commanding some of the world’s largest stages — where it’s sometimes accompanied by legends its members looked up to while growing up, like Ramón Ayala, and other huge stars it has now recorded with, like Peso Pluma, Maluma and Nicki Nicole. By melding the norteño and cumbia of their childhoods with their micro-generation’s penchant for embracing genre swerves (most of the band members are young millennials, save for Solís, who’s about to turn 22), Grupo Frontera has helped usher in a new era of música mexicana.

“I feel that they’ve created a powerful movement and opened the path for more bands and for the public to reconnect with a genre that had been under the radar several years,” says Edgar Barrera, the Grammy- and Latin Grammy-winning songwriter who has written dozens of songs for the group and has been a mentor to it. Given that seven of the band’s singles and both of its studio albums have reached the top 10 on the Hot Latin Songs and Top Latin Albums charts, respectively, the approach seems to be working.

Grupo Frontera’s success story is all the more astonishing considering the unorthodox decisions its members have made along the way. For one thing, they have no interest in moving from the relatively quiet McAllen (population: roughly 150,000) to a Latin music metropolis like Miami or Los Angeles to be closer to potential opportunities. “We really take it to heart when they say, ‘Keep your feet on the ground,’ ” Guerrero says. “Us being humble is what’s going to take us farther.”

Adelaido “Payo” Solís

Jasmine Archie

Julian PeĂąa Jr.

Jasmine Archie

Instead, they’re bullish about staying close to home in the valley, a region that has made national headlines recently as one of the areas the Trump administration has targeted for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids. The Rio Grande Valley is also home to Intocable, one of the most successful norteño bands ever, and the region has historically produced talented musicians and even a handful of breakthrough stars — Bobby Pulido, Duelo and Freddy Fender among them — in spite of lacking the infrastructure that helps groups take the next big step.

In another unlikely turn, the band has released its music independently; indie label VHR Music put out its debut album, and the band self-released Jugando. But don’t mistake these decisions for ambivalence — the group is wary of staying in the same place, metaphorically speaking. “It’s not OK for you to be too comfortable and feel like what you’re doing right now is going to work out forever,” Solís says. And now Grupo Frontera finds itself at a new crossroads as it strategizes how to reach the next level of stardom — specifically, expanding its audience beyond the United States and Mexico, bringing its heart-tugging cumbias to new ears.

“We want to go someday to Japan,” Cantú says. “Any place we could play that’s different. Brazil is a goal we have … We want to put out our Mexican roots to the whole world.”

Grupo Frontera’s origin story is bound up in TikTok’s inscrutable algorithm. In early 2022, one of its first singles, the ebullient “No Se Va,” became ubiquitous on the platform, debuting at No. 50 on Hot Latin Songs and eventually climbing to the top 10. The guys had just started playing music together during off-hours from their day jobs as car dealership finance managers and ranchers. They cobbled together early videos for a few hundred dollars and learned about the music industry by searching “how to” tutorials on YouTube. When the TikTok spotlight suddenly shone on them, they seized the moment. The act soon started working with Barrera, and in mere months, it had released another hit, then another. “If it wasn’t for TikTok when we released ‘No Se Va,’ it probably would have stayed in our hometown of the valley,” Solís says.

Barrera — who has written and produced for megastars including Shakira and Maluma — has a distinctive sensibility that has no doubt helped Grupo Frontera’s sound evolve over the years. His guidance was a boon in those early days, and he especially helped the act see a bigger picture. “We were thinking about, ‘How do we do the biggest wedding here in the valley?’ And [Barrera] goes, ‘Wedding? How can you do the biggest stadiums in the whole world? That’s how you have to think,’ ” Peña remembers. “And we’re like, ‘All right, let’s think that way.’ And then little by little, when we would release a song, we would do it thinking that this song was going to go viral, this song was going to help us out. And it would work.”

From left: Beto Acosta, Julian Peña Jr., Juan Javier Cantú, Carlos Guerrero, Brian Ortega, and Adelaido “Payo” Solís of Grupo Frontera photographed December 20, 2024 in McAllen, Texas.

Jasmine Archie

It’s been practically three years to the day since Grupo Frontera first went nuclear on TikTok, back when talk of an outright ban wasn’t imminent. Yet some of the band members deleted their personal TikTok accounts recently and haven’t redownloaded the app since it returned online in mid-January following a brief ban. (The band’s professional TikTok is still active.) They don’t exactly miss it, personally. “I feel like I’m a new man,” Cantú says with a smile. These days, Solís has focused the attention he would have spent scrolling through TikTok on Splice, an app for sampling and creating songs. While Solís doesn’t consider himself a gloomy person, he admittedly gravitates toward “melancholy, sad, depressing chords” while writing. “That’s what inspires me, to be honest: those sadder chords.”

While Solís’ voice is his main instrument, he occasionally plays guitar, piano and accordion by ear. He’d like to get better at nailing down exactly what he wants to hear from the instrument he’s playing so those sounds can aid him with songwriting — something he has been doing more of since last year’s Jugando (where he was credited with co-writing the song “Ibiza,” which is about wanting to give a lover anything their heart desires).

Though Barrera has written most of Grupo Frontera’s songs so far, along with other writers like Ríos, the band feared becoming complacent by always yielding those creative duties to someone else. “We were comfortable with the fact that [Barrera] would send us a song and that’s it,” Solís says. “But at a certain point, we felt like we weren’t working for it.” The group started inviting other songwriters into the mix, and Solís began chipping in more after a generative writing camp with Barrera.

The band sees taking calculated sonic risks as pivotal to its next phase. In late January, for instance, Grupo Frontera hopped on a song with Spanish icon Alejandro Sanz, “Hoy no me siento bien,” that marked two milestones: It was the group’s first-ever salsa tune and its farthest-afield collaborator to date. “I’m not too sure if a bajo quinto has ever played salsa before, but Beto was trying his best,” Solís jokes. Unlike the band’s usual fare, the song doesn’t address being in (or out of) love, either. “But I love the message,” Solís says. “It’s like, ‘Today, I don’t feel OK and that’s OK.’ ”

“Yeah, like feeling bad is OK, too,” Cantú interjects. “That’s badass.”

Juan Javier CantĂş

Jasmine Archie

Carlos Guerrero

Jasmine Archie

On its recent collaborative EP with Fuerza Regida, Grupo Frontera moved in yet another direction: trying corridos imbued with a Tejano bent, along with its cumbias. While these projects have been well-received commercial successes, the prospect of potentially not hitting the mark, and perhaps even failing, doesn’t seem to deter the act. “That’s what we want to do — to tell the world that Frontera can collaborate with different artists and that we could also make different styles of music,” Cantú says. “That’s our goal, most likely, for this year. Not to get away from cumbia or norteño — that’s our base. But also like, ‘Hey, we could also play and sing this.’ ”

The morning after catching a transatlantic flight from Spain, the members of Grupo Frontera arrive at a local sports club in McAllen with rackets in tow. They’re here to play padel, a sport resembling tennis and squash, that they got hooked on thanks to its low chance of injury. As they arrive one by one, the guys seem in good spirits if a bit bleary-eyed. They begin warming up by bouncing balls against glass walls surrounding the court. Acosta arrives last, strolling in with a sheepish grin. “The tardy one,” the band’s publicist says with an eye roll. “You can put that in the article.”

Since only four players can be on the court at any given time, the men rotate sets. Acosta rolls up one pant leg to get his head in the game, then forcefully serves the yellow ball. It lands with a thwack on the court’s blue turf, and Cantú bursts out singing the keyboard riff from “The Final Countdown.” S–t-talking abounds. Guerrero, who suffered an injury after missing the last step of some stairs, is moving with some hesitation — but after playing a few focused rounds, he and Acosta win the impromptu tournament.

While they might be opponents on the court at this moment, they tend to operate as a single organism in the band’s day-to-day decision-making. They use a democratic process and any arguments are cleared up directly: “When one person is wrong, the rest of the group notices it and they just tell them straight up,” Solís says.

Solís sees a through line between the band’s padel habit and the heightened energy it unleashed on last year’s Live Nation-promoted Jugando tour. In 2023, when it first started touring extensively, Solís admits that he would tend to stay in the same spot while singing onstage. “Then this year, I would, like, run around and jump across the stage and stuff.” The guys start chortling, talking over one another as they consider how they might elevate their stage presence in 2025: “Backflips! Shirtless concerts! Splits!”

Should the band realize its stadium dreams, the group’s penchant for showmanship will likely still need to be amped up further. “The show needs an upgrade on the technical and musical sides,” explains Raymond Acosta, the director of talent management at Habibi who works with the band there. (The band has been signed to the management division of Rimas Entertainment since 2023.) “The larger space demands a greater offering to fans. It has to be a unique experience where fans feel part of something bigger than just a show. It’s a challenge to connect with every single person in that stadium.” But as Acosta sees it, a band like Grupo Frontera is up for that challenge: The act “can attract all types of crowds, which makes a significant difference.”

Beto Acosta

Jasmine Archie

For the moment, Grupo Frontera is embarking on something else it has never done before: taking a monthlong break to recalibrate from its breakneck touring schedule, right before delving into writing new music. The last item on its calendar in December involves distributing free holiday toys for a block party at Edinburg, Texas’ Bert Ogden Arena, where it held a spur-of-the-moment free performance for the community.

Grupo Frontera is cognizant of how it represents the Rio Grande Valley both out on the road and at home. And while it has always eschewed any talk of politics, it has inherently become part of any discussion of where the band comes from, as the U.S.-Mexico border is now a flash point for discussions about immigration, xenophobia and racism. When I ask in December if they’ve been feeling the reverberations of this particular political moment — with the vocally anti-immigrant Trump administration then about to enter the White House — and if their fans approach them wanting to talk about politics, the band deflects. “I mean, our group name, Grupo Frontera, I think it feels natural for people to be like, ‘You’re from the border,’ stuff like that,” Guerrero says. “We always try to keep that private.” Peña chimes in, saying that they strive to “talk about music, that’s it.” (Their publicist shuts down any further discussion of the topic.)

But recently, the band had to answer for a political controversy of its own, when a video of Solís’ grandmother (known as “La Abuela Frontera” online) dancing to “Y.M.C.A.,” a song that Trump played frequently on the campaign trail, circulated online. Coupled with a now-deleted TikTok video of the band jamming to the same song, it prompted outrage from fans who perceived it as the group celebrating Trump’s election win. The backlash has since led to boycotts and a petition calling for Grupo Frontera to be taken off the lineup for Sueños, a Chicago musical festival where it’s slated to perform in May.

In response, the band wrote in a statement that “Grupo Frontera has NO affiliation nor alliance with any political party that’s against immigrants and the Latino community. Like many of you, our families and [group] members have fought and struggled for a better future, and we will always take our people’s side, defending our roots and values. It’s important you know that the opinions of our friends and family don’t represent Grupo Frontera. We are immigrants, we are from the border, and Grupo Frontera will always be by and for the people.” The band also posted a video in late February stating that the “Y.M.C.A.” video had been part of a routine it had on its last tour, where it danced to a different song before each show; in it, Acosta lamented how a swirl of “fake news” had been “putting us against our own people.”

As they see it, their main obligation is to elevate the valley in the eyes of the world, especially the musicians who hail from their same stomping grounds. “There’s a lot of talent,” Guerrero says of musicians in the valley. “Better than us,” Acosta adds. To them, what prevents musicians from making a successful living in music here is a lack of recording studios — but they want to leave behind a “trail for everybody to do it,” Cantú says. That might eventually involve having bands record at their own studio. As the guys see it, it’s not so much that they “made it” out of the valley, but rather that they’re “trying to make the valley grow,” as Solís puts it.

It was that same kind of support that first convinced Grupo Frontera to stay independent, after hearing cautionary tales from Acosta’s brother and other local musicians who had signed unfavorable record deals. Since then, it has made as much of an effort to learn the back end of the music business as it does fine-tuning chord progressions, often seeking Barrera’s counsel. Even after it was first approached by a few big labels, the band had “a gut feeling that it was not the right choice at the time,” Cantú says, a smile growing across his face. “And it worked out pretty good.”

The members believe these incremental steps, along with their unconventional approach, will take them where they eventually plan to be. “We’re trying to become superstars,” Peña says. “Something that 30 years from now, somebody’s going to look back [and say], ‘Dude, you remember Frontera?’ ”

A while back, Peña recalls, someone in Grupo Frontera (he doesn’t remember who) mentioned wanting to become like AC/DC or Queen — a timeless band steeped in mythos. At first, Peña scoffed at the idea. “I remember saying, ‘Dude, shut up. Like, what the hell?’ ” he says. “And now I think about it like, ‘Why not?’ I mean, why can’t we be that?”

This story appears in the March 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.

On an overcast winter afternoon in McAllen, Texas, all six members of Grupo Frontera are huddled around an oversize white box, staring gleefully at its contents. They peel back the tissue paper wrapping to reveal a present their stylist has gifted them just a few days shy of Christmas — a mound of plush Polo […]

On the brick wall facing the Pittsburg Hot Links parking lot, a mural memorializes the small East Texas town’s most famous citizens, including Mean Gene the Hot Link King and Homer Jones, the New York Giants receiver who invented spiking the football after a touchdown.
Soon enough, Pittsburg native Koe Wetzel could be right up there with them. “Maybe [after] a couple more No. 1s,” Wetzel muses as he looks up at those faces. He sounds dubious that he has earned his spot quite yet, but the 32-year-old singer-songwriter is well on his way. His breakthrough hit about a volatile relationship, “High Road” with Jessie Murph, spent five weeks at No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Airplay chart in December and January. “I know the folks who own the place,” he adds with a laugh. “I might go buy some watercolors and paint it myself.”

Koe Wetzel performs at Billboard Presents THE STAGE at SXSW at Moody Amphitheater at Waterloo Park in Austin on March 13. Get your tickets here.

Wetzel may not believe he’s a local legend yet, but it’s clear that here in his hometown, his star status is confirmed. As he strides across the crosswalk Abbey Road-style in historic Downtown Pittsburg at 8:30 a.m., a fan sticks his head out of a store door and yells “My hero!” his way. Wetzel left Pittsburg (population: 4,335) when he was 18 to attend Tarleton State University in Stephensville, Texas, on a football scholarship as a linebacker. He now lives outside Fort Worth, but his roots run through his gritty brand of country rock, which he delivers in a powerful twang that draws on the long tradition of Texas outlaw country and confessional storytellers like Townes Van Zandt and Guy Clark.

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“Koe is the epitome of an artist that is writing his own narrative,” Jelly Roll tells Billboard of Wetzel, whom he toured with in 2022 on the wryly titled Role Models outing. “He’s not writing what everyone else writes. He’s not trying to write another person’s narrative; he’s writing the way he naturally feels. I’ve been a fan of his for a long time — since his first project.”

Whatever he’s singing about — turbulent romances, getting busted for drunk driving or popping pills to get to sleep after a show — in song and conversation, Wetzel is unashamedly himself, with no apologies and no regrets, just like his namesake, country rabble-rouser David Allan Coe. “I was probably conceived to a David Allan Coe song,” he speculates. (His full name is Ropyr Madison Koe Wetzel; “My mom was pretty indecisive,” he says with a playful shake of his head at the multiple names.)

By the time he got kicked out of college his sophomore year for “having too good a time,” Wetzel was already playing shows and focused more on music than books. “Being a Texas artist, you can tour year-round here in Texas. A lot of people do and make a damn good living at it,” he says. “Coming up, that was kind of my main goal and pretty much my only goal.”

Koe Wetzel photographed January 22, 2025 in Pittsburg, Texas.

Eric Ryan Anderson

Jeb Hurt, who has managed Wetzel since 2019, recalls seeing him at a 300-capacity venue in San Marcos, Texas, in 2016. “If there were 200 there, 125 of them were college girls, and they were crammed against the stage screaming every word back to the band,” he says. Hurt, then a booking agent, quickly signed Wetzel, whose audiences grew exponentially through word-of-mouth. “If it was 200 people, the next time there were 400, then 800,” Hurt says. “Next thing you know, we’re in 5,000-cap venues in 24 months.”

Now, Wetzel — who signed with Columbia Records in 2020 — is building his audience around the rest of the country and the world. He toured in Europe last year and will play Australia in March. “It used to be about having a good time, making rent, making gas money to get to the next show,” Wetzel reflects. “And now it’s completely different. It’s wild to see where it’s come from and where we’re at.”

While his act is still built around raising hell onstage, Wetzel has realized that by sharing his own often unsettling stories, he’s helping others feel less alone. “Whenever I see those people sing the songs back or I’m meeting them and [they’re] telling me that what I told them saved their life — they were going to off themselves — that is really special,” Wetzel says, his voice growing thick with emotion. “I didn’t know that it was going to be that way, but now that it is, it’s opened up my mind and my eyes … This isn’t about just taking care of the family anymore and setting everybody up. It’s more about helping these folks live life. But they’re helping me as well. Without them, I’d be out pouring concrete.”

When Wetzel began working on his current album, 2024’s 9 Lives, with Columbia senior vp of A&R Ben Maddahi, his relationship with the label was bruised. “We’d had a bumpy road in our first few album cycles with Columbia,” Hurt says. “Some people left pretty consistently, and so by the time we got to Ben, there was kind of a sense of exhaustion on our [part] of just another A&R person being thrown our way.”

That’s not to say he hadn’t achieved some level of success. After releasing three albums independently, Wetzel had put out two more through the label, including his cheekily titled Columbia debut, Sellout. That and his second album, 2022’s Hell Paso, had together registered eight songs in the top 40 of Billboard’s Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart, and the latter set reached No. 3 on Top Country Albums.

Columbia Records chairman/CEO Ron Perry asked Maddahi, who had worked with pop forces like Sia, Flo Rida and Charlie Puth, to meet with Wetzel. “Ron said something to the effect of, ‘He sells tons of tickets and has a die-hard fan base … We have really high hopes for him, but for some reason this hasn’t worked so far,’ ” Maddahi says.

In June 2023, Maddahi flew to Fort Worth to see Wetzel perform a sold-out show at the 14,000-capacity Dickies Arena. “He had an entire arena of people shouting out every word from the nosebleeds to the front row,” Maddahi recalls. “I came back [to the office] saying, ‘This guy’s a superstar.’ ”

Eric Ryan Anderson

Maddahi next flew to a show in Modesto, Calif., after which he and Wetzel had a heart-to-heart about the next album. “I wanted to slow things down,” says Wetzel, who was listening to acts like ambient pop band Cigarettes After Sex. “I didn’t want the super-edgy guitars, really loud drums.”

Maddahi paired him with Gabe Simon, best known for co-producing Noah Kahan’s Stick Season, and brought in several new co-writers, including Amy Allen, who won the 2024 Grammy Award for songwriter of the year and has written hits for Sabrina Carpenter and Harry Styles. It was during a writers camp with Allen and several other songwriters that the midtempo “High Road,” about a tempestuous, dysfunctional relationship, was born.

He and Maddahi immediately thought of Jessie Murph, whom Wetzel had co-written with before, to join him on “High Road,” and when she sent over a verse, “she killed it,” Wetzel recalls. Columbia partnered with RECORDS Nashville to work the song to country radio, and its ascent began.

“He’s very true to himself, and the songs he writes are exactly how he is, which is something I respect a lot,” Murph says of Wetzel. “When I first heard ‘High Road,’ it felt very nostalgic to me. It felt like a song I could’ve heard when I was a kid, which I loved.” To thank Murph, Wetzel bought her a pistol engraved with their names and the song’s title that took three months to make. “I felt it was really Texas of me,” he says proudly.

9 Lives’ cover is a photograph of the double-wide trailer Wetzel lived in with his parents until he was 12. It’s abandoned now and has fallen into disrepair, with broken slats on the wood steps and prickly bushes growing over the front porch. But inside, it’s still full of books, video tapes, pots and pans, photos of his maternal and paternal great-grandparents and a CD of Miranda Lambert’s 2007 album, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. Long gone are the posters that hung on Wetzel’s bedroom walls of his first crush, teen pop star JoJo, and legendary slugger Mark McGwire. The last inhabitant he remembers was his uncle, who died several years ago. He’s not sure who’s living there now, if anyone. Standing inside, he surmises, “I think it’s just a big ol’ family of raccoons.”

His father was a truck driver who shifted into construction when Wetzel was around 11, enabling the family to build a house on the land and move out of the trailer. His mother was a bank teller and a singer who often took Wetzel along to her gigs. He remembers, at age 5, grabbing his dad’s old Hummingbird guitar that was down to two or three strings, “being in my Spider-Man underwear and feeling like I was playing to a million people. Looking back now, it’s like a dream come true.”

Koe Wetzel photographed January 22, 2025 in Pittsburg, Texas.

Eric Ryan Anderson

As a teen, he loved ’90s country, especially acts like the rough-hewn Kentucky Headhunters. But he also loved Nirvana, so much so that at 12 he asked for tickets to see the band for Christmas — and his parents had to break the news that not only was the band not together, but Kurt Cobain had been dead for a decade. “Nirvana had a huge impact,” he says. “I think that resonates with the way I play music — the big guitars, the catchy melodic hooks.”

The trailer sits on 100 acres of land that his great-grandfather bought in the 1930s. Wetzel’s family had gotten behind on the taxes and risked losing it until he bought and paid off the property in 2021. “This land means so much to me and my family. I never wanted anyone else to have it,” he says. While he doesn’t see living on it again himself, he plans to add some cows and, “hopefully, raising a family and having them come out here.”

That family is expanding soon: Wetzel and his girlfriend, Bailey Fisher, are expecting a baby girl in June, news they would announce on social media a few weeks after our interview. “We dated in college, and the last two years resparked everything,” Wetzel explains, then adds with typical candor, “It’s not some random chick I knocked up. I mean, we’re excited as hell. I’m scared as f–k … I’m getting older, I’m growing out of the college party lifestyle I’ve been on the last 10 years … They say there’s always a time to grow up and get your s–t together, and my stuff is not together by no means at all, [but] it’s a lot different than what it was.”

In a corner of Koe Wetzel’s Riot Room stands Dirty Sancho. The nonworking mechanical bull, named for the first Professional Bull Riders bull Wetzel bought (he now owns eight) is just one piece of his personal memorabilia decorating the 7,000-square-foot bar and nightclub Wetzel opened in Fort Worth’s Cultural District in 2023. “We’ve had to sew his head back on a couple of times,” he says of Dirty Sancho. “He’s seen some s–t.”

Wetzel opened the Fort Worth bar, in part, so he would have a place to “drink and party and not worry about people putting me in jail at night,” he says, sitting on a stool in the Riot Room sipping tequila over ice. (A second Riot Room will open in Houston later this year, with hopes of more locations to follow.)

He’s not kidding around. His boisterous “February 28, 2016” from 2016’s Noise Complaint chronicles the night he was arrested for drunk driving, describing how in his inebriated state he just wants to find someone “sober enough to take me to Taco Bell.” The song has become an anthem for his fans, so much so that they’ve made Feb. 28 unofficial Koe Wetzel Day. On that day this year, he released a live album culled from 2024’s Damn Near Normal tour to thank his fans and dropped by the bar to play a few songs live, but he winces a little when he talks about the tune.

“Whenever we play it, I’m very grateful for what it’s done for us, but I’m kind of like, ‘F–k,’ ” he says. He doesn’t hate the song, exactly — it’s just that he’s in a very different place at 32 than he was when he wrote it at 24. “I’m not that person as an artist anymore,” he says. “I’m not that person just having a good time.”

Eric Ryan Anderson

He has different regrets about “Drunk Driving” from 2020’s Sellout. In a catalog of dark songs, it’s one of Wetzel’s darkest: The narrator is driving drunk and trying to outrun his sins as he sings, “Everybody’s got to die somehow/Why not me right now.” It was Wetzel’s attempt to put himself in the mindset of some friends who had died in drunk driving accidents, and, looking back, he wishes he had named it something else. “The song’s not about condoning drunk driving or anything like that,” he says. “It’s a very emotional song.”

Then there’s Hell Paso track “Cabo,” which he swears is a true story about spending money on hookers and blow in the Mexican resort town. The crowd goes crazy when he plays it, he says, but he admits, “Me and Mama haven’t really talked about that one. I know it’s not her favorite by far.” (His mother and father do have plenty of other favorites and frequently come to his gigs: “I think they cry every damn show, her and my pops,” he says. “They’re crying, singing all the words. They’re proud of their baby boy.”)

The connection his fans have to some of Wetzel’s older, often brutally honest lyrics can lead to the misperception that he’s “some f–king hellion,” says Wetzel, who quit counting his number of tattoos at 36. “I feel like most of my music came from whenever I was going balls to the wall, and it’s just kind of not who I am anymore. I can still run it with the best of them, but I feel like they make their opinion of me before they get to meet me, and sometimes that sucks.”

Still, he admits that 1 p.m. Koe and 4 a.m. Koe are two different people. “That’s rock star Koe. He’s kind of a d–k,” he says of the late-night version. “He’s a lot of fun, but he can get out of hand really f–king fast.”

Eric Ryan Anderson

He has somewhat curbed his drinking, including switching from whiskey to tequila. On his Damn Near Normal tour last year, he and some of his bandmates had a ritual: “An hour before the show, we’ll drink a bottle of tequila. If I start earlier, then the show will be s–t, but if I start just after 5 p.m. and kind of drink a couple beers, bottle of tequila, then it’s like the right amount. You get onstage, everything’s smooth sailing, and it feels good.”

He has also changed his after-show routine, hopping straight on the bus as soon as the concert is over. “They took the after-parties away from me. I go shower on the bus, put my comfy clothes on, drink a couple beers, watch a movie, and I was in bed by midnight, 1 o’clock,” he says before admitting: “Honestly, I kind of enjoyed it. I sounded better than I ever had because I was taking care of myself a little bit more.”

Koe Wetzel’s lake house is haunted by a ghost his two younger sisters have named Irene. There’s an underwater cemetery about 100 yards away in the lake, but no one knows if there’s any connection. Irene causes all kinds of mischief, Wetzel says, including throwing bottles off the bar and turning on the TV. “You’ll see her walking the balcony up here every now and then,” he says, describing an opaque apparition. “She kind of f–ks with new people who stay here.” As if on cue, the closed front door suddenly swings wide open on its own.

Irene’s presence notwithstanding, “it’s a safe haven for me,” Wetzel says of this place on Pittsburg’s outskirts. With its spotty cell service, he can unplug, write and relax. “I bought it for us to make more memories,” he says of his friends and family, who come to grill and hang out on his five boats.

The walls on one side are lined with RIAA plaques — 12 of his songs have been certified gold or platinum — while the rest are covered with fish, bird and deer mounts, including deer killed by three generations of Wetzel men. But pride of place goes to an alligator skull on a sideboard; Wetzel killed the reptile with a buck knife during COVID-19 isolation in Matagorda Bay, Texas. “I got in the water, Steve Irwin’d him a little bit,” he says, sipping a Busch Light and pointing to a photo of him sitting astride the alligator. “Cool story to tell but my mom hates that story. She don’t like it when I do dumb s–t. She worries about her baby way too much.”

Eric Ryan Anderson

There’s also a photo of him with a giant catfish he caught with his bare hands — known as noodling — in the lake. His biggest catch has been 62 pounds, which he and his buddies tagged and tossed back. Asked whether killing a bear with a bow and arrow or having a five-week No. 1 is more satisfying, Wetzel pauses to give the question considerable thought, then decides: “Adrenaline-wise, killing a bear with a bow. Accomplishment-wise, a five-week No. 1.”

For all his love of hunting and fishing, those subjects haven’t found their way into Wetzel’s music. “I feel like I was put here to write about relationships gone bad or going good. Real-world stuff, I guess,” he says. “Not saying that hunting is not. It’s a huge part of my life and I love it to death, but I just guess I haven’t figured out what I wanted to say about it yet.”

Yet as he begins working on new music, Wetzel, who will tour this year with HARDY and Morgan Wallen, as well as play Stagecoach and other festivals, says he’s increasingly finding that all his passions are intertwined.

“I feel like every time I’m [writing], it peels back a layer of who I am. I find something that I didn’t know was there,” he says. “Whenever you get the song completed, there’s no more holes in it. There’s nothing else you could do for that song. It’s like, ‘Man, this is insane. This is really cool.’ It’s almost like the noodling and the hunting for me: It’s something that I feel like I’ll never master, but it’s what keeps me coming back and back. It’s a cool deal.”

This story appears in the March 8, 2025, issue of Billboard.

On the brick wall facing the Pittsburg Hot Links parking lot, a mural memorializes the small East Texas town’s most famous citizens, including Mean Gene the Hot Link King and Homer Jones, the New York Giants receiver who invented spiking the football after a touchdown. Soon enough, Pittsburg native Koe Wetzel could be right up […]