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“Is Laufey jazz?”
This was a recent topic among the armchair musicologists of Reddit’s r/Jazz thread, who spend much of their time debating the genre. It’s also the title of a 33-minute deep dive by YouTuber and musician Adam Neely where he dissects the 24-year-old cellist, singer and songwriter’s harmonic and chordal choices on a granular, theoretical level in an attempt to answer the question too.
Trying to neatly categorize whether Laufey (pronounced LAY’-vay) makes music that is jazz or something else misses the point of what she is doing. Laufey is building a modern and surprisingly lucrative musical world out of old-school building blocks — ii-V-I jazz chords, classical music motifs, bebop ad-libs — plus more than a pinch of Taylor Swift-ian storytelling.
But it’s Laufey’s wider aesthetic world — “Laufey Land,” as she calls it — that a remarkable number of Gen Z fans are flocking to. While traditional jazz can feel esoteric, Laufey makes it accessible by inviting followers into Laufey Land on social media — a place where her best days involve sipping lattes, reading Joan Didion and wearing the latest styles from Sandy Liang, and where listening to Chet Baker and playing the cello are the absolute coolest, hippest things to do. “It’s all kind of illustrative of my life and my music,” she says, and she shares both online generously.
Laufey Land (which has also become the name of her official fan HQ Instagram account) has also captured the imagination of the music business: sources say she sparked a multimillion-dollar bidding war last year among record labels that have rarely seen so much commercial potential in a jazz-adjacent act, though she remains independent for now. Perhaps that’s because her music renders a wistful, romantic portrait of young adulthood that can feel fantastical yet still within reach. And even if you’re not quite familiar with her own lofty influences — Chopin, Liszt, Baker, Fitzgerald, Holiday — Laufey invites you to sit with her, listen along and get lost in a magical place where, sure, the music is jazz-y, but is also so much more than that.
Raised between Iceland and the Washington, D.C., area, Laufey Lín Jónsdóttir grew up surrounded by classical musicians. Her Chinese mother is a violinist, and her grandparents were violin and piano professors; it was her Icelandic father who introduced her to jazz. “There was just so much music in the house growing up,” she recalls today. “It was a sonic blend of those two.”
Laufey and her identical twin sister, Junia — who now acts as Laufey’s creative director and is a frequent guest star in her TikToks — started playing young. Eventually Junia landed on violin and Laufey on cello (though she also plays piano and guitar). Until college, she saw herself more as a performer and practitioner of music than as a writer of it. But at the Berklee College of Music in Boston, she found many of her new friends were penning their own songs.
This digital cover story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
Though Laufey says she always listened to pop music as well — she especially loved the storybook tales of early Swift songs — she felt that “oftentimes the lyrics and the storytelling resonated, but the sound [of pop music] wasn’t completely there. I didn’t feel like it was something I could make, and I wanted to make something that sounded more like me.” A self-described “sheltered orchestra kid,” she also didn’t yet have much life experience to expound upon lyrically.
Like so many artists before her, Laufey says she was finally propelled into songwriting when she had her heart broken. Borrowing chords closely related to the Great American Songbook that she had spent so much time studying already, she created “Street by Street,” which eventually became her first single. She was 20 years old. “The way I wanted to write was to find this middle ground between the very old and the very new,” she says. “I remember thinking, ‘Wow, you can do this. You can write something new in the style of George Gershwin or Irving Berlin — something older.’ ”
When COVID-19 hit and forced everyone into lockdown, school ended, and to stay in vocal shape, Laufey began posting her takes on jazz standards online, her smooth alto accompanied by either cello arrangements or acoustic guitar. “The day I got back from school and started isolating, I told myself, ‘OK, I’m just going to write and post as many videos online of me singing jazz standards as I can,’ ” she recalls. “I’ll just see where it takes me.” An early video of her singing “It Could Happen to You” “hit some sort of algorithm,” as she puts it, and quickly, her following grew, attracting interest from a number of record labels, though she opted to sign to AWAL instead.
Today — one EP, two studio albums and one live album with the Iceland Symphony Orchestra later — Laufey is quite possibly the most popular artist making jazz or jazz-adjacent music, according to metrics like Spotify monthly listeners (24 million) and Instagram and TikTok followers (2.2 million and 3.6 million, respectively). Her breakout single, the bossa nova-inspired “From the Start,” is a massive hit, with 313.1 million on-demand official global streams, according to Luminate. And she’s now a Grammy nominee: Her second album, Bewitched, released in September 2023, is up for best traditional pop vocal album, an eclectic category this year where she’s the one new talent alongside veterans Bruce Springsteen and Liz Callaway and the late Stephen Sondheim. “It feels very, very validating, especially in the category I’m in,” Laufey says.
Tony Luong
The debate about what genre signifiers define Laufey may still matter at the Grammys (and on the Billboard charts, which categorize her as “jazz”), but there is far less need to label music than there once was, benefiting artists like Laufey who bridge disparate sonic worlds. “I think people’s desire to categorize things into genres was so rooted in radio, where they were trying to fit into a certain format to succeed,” says Max Gredinger, Laufey’s manager and a partner at Foundations Artist Management. “I think that is kind of ingrained in us, but now that terrestrial radio has certainly diminished in impact, I think people are still wrapping their heads around this new world.”
Around the time Laufey started to build her audience, TikTok’s reign over music discovery had just taken hold. It’s a place where personality and catchiness count but genre is of no consequence — the perfect platform for an artist like Laufey where she could define her jazz-inflected pop as not just a sound but as an aesthetic, a feeling, a lifestyle both timeless and very much of the moment.
Gredinger calls Laufey and her sister “the 2024 version of what you think of as a marketing executive. I would bet on them to do that job best a trillion times over.” Beyond music and slice-of-life videos, Laufey invites her fans into her process in other ways. She has posted sheet music versions of her songs before releasing them, asking her musician fans (of which there are many) to try to learn the song without hearing any reference and post the results, which she’ll then repost in the lead-up to release day.
She also hosts a book club, with selections — from Donna Tartt’s The Secret History to Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted — that feel akin to her music and her personal style, somewhere between darkly academic and coquettishly feminine. On the release day for Bewitched, she hosted A Very Laufey Day, a sort-of scavenger hunt around Los Angeles, involving everything she likes to do in a day. It included special Laufey Lattes, a display of her book club selections at a local shop and a merchandise pop-up at the Melrose Trading Post; at the end, she treated participants to a secret performance in West Hollywood’s Pan Pacific Park.
“It was like a normal Saturday for me,” Laufey says with a laugh. “I would’ve done all those things either way. I drove around West Hollywood and saw girls in white shirts, jeans and ballet flats carrying lattes and I would roll down the window and say hey and surprise them.” Her fans range from ultra-online teens to nerdy music majors to nostalgic grandparents, but her core base is Gen Z, many of whom do not listen to jazz or classical otherwise.
When she was younger, Laufey says, she never anticipated the mainstream popularity she has now. “If anything, I thought I would go the conservatory route, practice cello and try to get into the best orchestra I could, like my mother did,” she says. “I was so focused on being realistic that I almost didn’t allow myself to dream so big.”
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She remembers one of her first shows after pandemic lockdowns eased up, at New York’s Rockwood Music Hall, where she heard there was a line of fans outside waiting to be let in. “I was really confused,” she says. “I grew up going to symphony concerts primarily, and nobody lines up like that, you just walk in. I was like, ‘Oh, no. Let them in! What is happening?’” It was the first time she realized that her fans weren’t just a number on her screen: They would show up for her in real life, learn all the words to her songs and were shockingly young.
Norah Jones, a hero of Laufey’s and one of the few modern artists to, like her, bridge the jazz-pop divide, says she sees “a lot of similarities” between herself and Laufey. “We both come from a background steeped in jazz and have formed our own paths from there,” Jones says. “[But] because social media and streaming have changed the music industry so much, her journey is also so different from mine.” (The two recently collaborated on a set of holiday songs, Christmas With You.)
Unlike Jones, who has a long-standing relationship with Blue Note Records/Capitol Records, Laufey has opted to stay independent — a clear sign of the times. Industry sources say she recently sparked a multimillion-dollar bidding war among major labels, but she finally decided to keep her business among herself, Gredinger and AWAL (which handles label services and distribution) instead.
“With the kind of music I make,” she says, “I make very individualistic choices. I’m very confident in my music. I know what I want, and my current team at AWAL has let me make those creative decisions. I’ve had a great time being independent, so I haven’t felt like I’ve been lacking anything. Making independent decisions is my main focus.”
In the future, Laufey Land’s borders are likely to only expand further. She envisions her sweeping love songs soundtracking musicals and films someday, like Harry Connick Jr., Jon Batiste and Sara Bareilles have done. The ultimate dream? A James Bond theme. “I’ll just keep on repeating that I want that, so it manifests itself maybe,” she says, smiling.
Batiste, who also knows what it’s like to move between jazz and pop music spaces, thinks she’s on the right track. “Laufey approaches all of these many facets [of a music career] with a great deal of prowess, deftness of craft and insight into how to connect with her community,” he says. “That will only continue to attract more curious listeners.”
“I think there are a lot of barriers to entry to listening to jazz… [It] can be very daunting,” Laufey says. “I’m lucky I was born into that world, but I’m aware of how scary it can seem. It seems like something that’s reserved for maybe older or more educated audiences. I think that’s so sad, because both jazz and classical music were genres that were the popular music of one time. It was for everyone. That’s one of the reasons I want to fuse jazz and classical into my own music: I want to make a more accessible space.”
Tony Luong
She points to artists like DOMi & JD BECK and Samara Joy, young jazz talents she admires who are actively evolving the genre today. “Jazz hasn’t gone anywhere — it’s actually, I think, gone into music more,” Laufey says, pointing to its influence on hip-hop, R&B and pop. “The amount of times I hear a pop song really hitting the charts and everyone’s like, ‘It’s so good’ — in my head, I’m like, ‘Yeah, that’s because of this jazz harmony that really draws you in.’”
Her own sound borrows primarily from that of the jazz greats of the 1940s and ’50s — one reason, perhaps, why her songs connect so well. As tracks featuring sizable samples or interpolations of older hits continue to rise on the Billboard charts, experts posit that the pandemic led to an increasing interest in songs that feel nostalgic.
Though Laufey’s work sounds quite different from, say, “First Class” by Jack Harlow, the same primal desire for familiarity and comfort is at the root of its appeal. “I think a lot of the sounds that she pulls from, every person has some connection to,” Gredinger says. “You would be hard pressed to find someone who didn’t have some memory or relationship with jazz or classical. It’s a foundational experience most everyone has had, combined with modern, honest songwriting.”
And it’s the combination of those elements that create the foundation of Laufey’s own brave new world. One where true love is possible, every day is romanticized, major sevenths are essential — and all kinds of listeners are welcome.
September’s Hip-Hop Forever show at Madison Square Garden in New York — part of the yearlong celebration of the genre’s 50th anniversary — brought the stars out. Alongside legends who helped build hip-hop’s storied past was a slightly more unexpected booking: Jamaican dancehall king Sean Paul. He tore the house down with hits like “Give It Up to Me” and “Like Glue,” reminders of a time, in the early 2000s, when dancehall records topped the Billboard charts — when Paul, who has now traded his trademark cornrows for a crisp, neat Caeser, effortlessly mixed dancehall’s infectious riddims with hip-hop sensibilities and aesthetics. Blending reggae and dancehall with other popular genres wasn’t a new idea when Paul did it, but no one else besides Bob Marley and Shaggy had done so to greater effect.
At least until now. That night, Paul wasn’t the only dancehall MC to bless the stage. One of the “special guests” teased on the show’s flier was a comparatively little-known 29-year-old guy from Montego Bay, Jamaica, that most audience members couldn’t pick out of a lineup if they were promised the numbers to the next Powerball. But though silence at first overtook the crowd when he stepped onstage, Teejay looked every inch the star when he arrived.
Invited as a guest of Funkmaster Flex, the longtime Hot 97 DJ who oversaw the night’s proceedings, Teejay emerged dripped out in a Gucci jacket and matching sneakers. And when the opening chords of his current hit, “Drift,” blared out of the speakers, concertgoers slowly caught on: This was the guy who made the song that had taken over TikTok for a few months last year. As Teejay warmed up to the crowd, so did they, breaking into the signature dance that would help propel “Drift” to a No. 47 debut on Billboard’s R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay chart three weeks after the Garden performance.
It was a big night for Teejay — one that affirmed that the hard work he’d been putting in over the past three years was finally paying off. So what if few can yet recognize him by face? They recognize his music. Well, sort of.
“Most people still don’t know what I’m saying,” says Teejay with a laugh, thinking back to the Garden show. We’re in Los Angeles, meeting for the second time at his Billboard photoshoot, and his fit looks as if it costs more than most people’s monthly income. “But they love the vibe. They love the music. They love the sound. So, I just work with it.”
This digital cover story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
Born Timoy Janeyo Jones in Montego Bay, Teejay learned early on to just work with it. To most people from outside Jamaica, Montego Bay is an idyllic resort city, but it has a shadier side that doesn’t make travel brochures or TV commercials. One in which families of nine like Teejay’s — he grew up with his mother, uncle, five brothers and one sister — live in small board houses, in sometimes dangerous neighborhoods (like Glendevon, where Teejay’s family lived). His brothers were all musicians who as kids picked up digital production and recording software like FruityLoops and Pro Tools to produce music. Naturally, Teejay took to them as well.
“I started recording myself at the age of 9,” he says. “Every day, I would come home and see them recording with Pro Tools and I’d just sit there for hours, and when they’d gone, I’d just record myself.”
Michael Buckner
The autodidactic method worked. By the time Teejay was in seventh grade, he decided to leave school behind and focus on music full time. “My teacher asked me, ‘What do you want to be in life?’ And everybody in the class said they want to be a policeman, a lawyer, a judge, a doctor. I tell the teacher I want to be an artist. She said, ‘That’s not professional. Give me something else.’ I said, ‘Entertainer!’ ” When he was supposed to be taking notes, Teejay was instead tapping out riddims on his desk. His teacher told him that he needed to take that noise to the music class — so he did.
The way he saw it, he could help his family much more financially if he dedicated his time to growing into an artist like 2Pac or the Jamaican great Jah Cure — two of the MCs idolized in his neighborhood. “Growing up in my community, we listened to 2Pac every single day. Once you’re a Montegonian, you’re going to know about 2Pac and Jah Cure music.”
His focus paid off when Tommy Lee — fellow Montegonian and controversial mentee of incarcerated dancehall star Vybz Kartel — let Teejay rock with him and his crew, even helping the fledgling artist score his first live performance in 2010. The experience left Teejay feeling like he could actually become a star. But it would take a good while longer before the dreams in his mind materialized outside of his head.
Steve Jobs famously said, “Good artists copy, great artists steal.” Teejay watched the artists who were remaking dancehall in the early 2000s — artists like Movado, Aidonia, Busy Signal and Tommy Lee, who were all more different than similar — and studied what made them connect not only with Jamaican fans, but the throngs of dancehall fans around the world. He took bits and pieces from each one’s style, creating a dancehall sound that was fluid, melodic and, at times, lyrically crazy.
Over the next eight years, he produced a torrent of music, culminating in his 2018 regional hit, “Uptop Boss.” Though it didn’t make much noise in the United States, the slinky gangster dance track was a massive hit on the island; its official video has racked up over 16 million views on YouTube.
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Then, tragedy struck: Two of Teejay’s close friends, who often appeared in his videos and lyrics — Romario “Grimmy Boss” Wallen and Philip “Afro-Man” Lewis — were gunned down in St. Andrew, Jamaica, on June 4, 2020. (The two were reportedly just hanging out on the block when a shooter pulled up and opened fire.) Condolences poured out from fans and fellow dancehall artists, with many posting photos and comments on Instagram. But Teejay went quiet: He deleted everything on his Instagram page except for two posts of his departed friends.
Wallen’s and Lewis’ deaths derailed Teejay’s momentum just as he was finding his footing as an artist — but they were also a wake-up call. He took time away from music, leaving the country for a bit and settling at a friend’s house in Miami to refocus his energy and clear his head. His friends’ deaths affected both his physical and mental health: He changed his diet and started to eat healthier, in turn losing a lot of weight. But the biggest change wasn’t what he was putting into his body — it was what he put into the world.
He no longer wanted to make music that was overtly gangster. “Hardcore music has a barrier,” he says. “It can’t be played in a Christian home or in certain homes. I decided that we’re not going to go violent; I want to do something happy.” To achieve that, he decided to make some changes — starting with who handled his business. “Jamaican artists don’t even know what a proper management is,” Teejay says. “As a Jamaican artist, we have to still go out there and look for a chauffeur ourselves and an interview, everything. Some people don’t even know that some people in Jamaica who say that they’re a manager are basically a booking agent.”
Sharon Burke, the leader of Teejay’s new management team since 2021, is much more than a booking agent. Co-founder and president of the Kingston, Jamaica-based Solid Agency, Burke has worked for years to bring reggae and dancehall music to a global audience. She has had a hand in the success of many of Jamaica’s biggest superstars, including Freddie McGregor, Barrington Levy, Bounty Killer and Aidonia. And her company produces the annual Island Music Conference, bringing the wider music world to Jamaica. When it came time to set up the Verzuz battle between Bounty Killer and Beanie Man — ultimately watched by over 3 million — it was Burke who Verzuz creators Swizz Beatz and Timbaland turned to.
Burke believes in Teejay — that he has what it takes to really leave a mark on the game much as some of her previous clients have — but she has impressed upon him that good music alone won’t take him to the top “I said, ‘Listen, if you’re just going to sit by and think it’s talent alone, I can’t work with you. It’s hard work. It’s about presentation. It’s about excellence. It’s about choreography in the way you move. So, if you’re ready for that journey, I will go it with you.’ ”
Michael Buckner
One of the first things Burke did was to connect Teejay with Panda, one of their in-house producers. While Teejay was in Miami getting his mind right, he began to think beyond the boundaries of the genre he’d worked within for so long. He loves dancehall — it’s the music he was raised on and the music that changed his life — but he understands that, right now, dancehall and reggae aren’t as popular as they once were.
Back in 2003 — when Sean Paul was hopping on remixes with Busta Rhymes, when LL Cool J jumped on Wayne Wonder’s “No Letting Go” remix, when Elephant Man had everyone ponning de river — new dancehall artists were making serious waves in rap and R&B music. Fast forward to 2021, when the bestselling reggae and dancehall artists in the United States were Paul, Bob Marley and Shaggy. No new artists broke onto the Billboard Hot 100 that year.
Now, another type of Black diasporic music, Afrobeats, has assumed the position reggae and dancehall once occupied. Over the past three years, an increasing number of new African artists have broken onto the charts with big singles, like Wizkid and Tems’ 2020 hit, “Essence,” the first Nigerian song in history to appear on the Hot 100, reaching No. 9 on the chart. Now, mainstream American rappers like Drake and Future and singers like Chris Brown are tapping the genre’s ascendant stars to help them move units. Future’s first Hot 100 No. 1 as a lead artist, for instance, came courtesy of a song that heavily samples Tems’ song “Higher” from her 2020 EP, Broken Ears.
“They’re saying now that Afrobeats is bigger than dancehall,” Teejay says. “I was at a show where there was an Afrobeats artist on the stage — I won’t say any names — and he was saying ‘our music is your music’ because they took pieces of all the legendary [dancehall] artists’ music.”
He took to the makeshift studio in the garage of his friend’s Miami house, puzzling over a riddim he’d had in his head for close to three years but couldn’t quite figure out how to translate into a workable beat. He wanted to make something that was new but also paid homage to the warm dancehall feeling that radiated from songs made by legends like Supacat and Shabba Ranks. Then, one day in 2022, he received a batch of beats from Panda. “I called the beat-maker and said, ‘Bro. You got it. This is good.’ ”
What he got turned into “Drift,” the slick dancehall ditty that could easily be mistaken for an Afrobeats song if not for its decidedly dancehall drum programming and, of course, Teejay’s perfectly syncopated bars that swell into what has become an inescapable chorus.
“Me and the team, we created something called ‘Afro dancehall,’ ” he says with a laugh. “It’s more of an Afrobeats song with a dancehall artist on it. At the time, dancehall music was kind of slow and really toxic, based on everything that was going on in Jamaica. I was like, ‘We need to embrace happiness [in] the world. Something everyone can dance to.’ We created that old dancehall feeling where people just want to dance. It’s simple math. We used less words and more melody so people can remember it.”
That last, key idea came to Teejay from his mentor, Shaggy, the platinum-selling superstar who’s also one of Burke’s partners at Solid Agency. Combining reggae and dancehall with music from around the world and making it as simple as possible to sing along to has been a Shaggy trademark since he dropped the Marvin Gaye-sampling “Boombastic” back in 1995. “He has been telling me, ‘Listen: choice of words,’ ” Teejay says. “ ‘Try to say less, but make sure it’s effective and that people can understand it.’ ”
“[Teejay’s] incredibly talented. He’s a guy that is making music outside of the box and he also works extremely f–king hard,” Shaggy says. “And I think that is the formula that is needed to have a very long and successful career.”
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A little luck also helps, and it was on Teejay’s side when it came to promoting “Drift.” He gave the song to a DJ who then leaked it on TikTok, and it took on a life of its own, becoming a top-used sound on the platform. Soon, celebrities like Jamaican Olympic gold medalist Usain Bolt and Cardi B were making TikToks doing the dance from the music video. “Drift” became Teejay’s first Billboard chart entry, landing at No. 47 on R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay.
While the song took Jamaican and U.S. audiences by surprise, its success isn’t that shocking to Shaggy. “In the early days, when I played stadiums in Africa, the majority of the music they were playing was dancehall,” he recalls. “The traditional music that you might hear from Fela Kuti and some of these original artists over there wasn’t the type of music you would hear in the nightclubs. Dancehall is what you heard in the nightclub. Whether it be Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, those are the songs that were played — dancehall. It has had a very strong influence on the African culture. So, to me, it’s all one.”
What does the future of dancehall look like if one of its most popular artists is co-opting the sound of another genre to make waves internationally? “If you listen to dancehall from the 2000s, it’s a totally different dancehall than what we have today. The sound of it is different,” Shaggy says. “The dancehall they make today is more a trap kind of dancehall. That’s just evolution at the end of the day. With an artist like Teejay, it gives him the opportunity to experiment and try a different vibe.”
On Dec. 15, 2023, Teejay released an official remix of “Drift” featuring none other than leading Afrobeats artist Davido (the song also has a couple of rap remixes at this point). He sounds perfectly at home on the track; if you didn’t know any better, you might assume that Teejay was the guest feature. Its success, and Teejay’s own, are proof that there’s an audience for this new sound, one that keeps dancehall’s driving groove intact while mixing in the breezy and blithe feel of Afrobeats. And if anything, it proves dancehall is at its best when pushed to new limits.
“I hope [new artists] keep experimenting and keep finding new ways,” Shaggy says. In other words, they just got to work with it.
“Do you have my black purse?” Sexyy Red asks one of her team members as she makes her way in front of the camera. As her brazen track “Sexyy Red for President” blasts in the background, the breakout St. Louis rapper pulls out two massive wads of cash, carefully placing one atop her trademark bright red wig as if it were a crown.
For all the boisterous energy of her high-octane hit singles, Sexyy Red is pretty quiet in person. The clock’s approaching midnight on the day of her Billboard photo shoot — and she’s quickly approaching the birth of her second child — so her relative calm is understandable. Nonetheless, as each new song from the deluxe version of her Hood Hottest Princess mixtape booms through the room’s speakers, Sexyy quickly shifts into boss mode, helping direct her shoot. She’s undoubtedly a star — and she was one long before “Pound Town,” her January collaboration with Tay Keith, changed her life.
As hip-hop celebrated its 50th anniversary in 2023, Sexyy Red became a dominant force in the cultural conversation around the genre and where it’s headed next. Go to a college party blasting her “Hellcats SRTs,” or watch a club explode when “Yonce Freestyle” drops, and the 25-year-old rapper’s influence is obvious. From the tongue-in-cheek “Looking for the Hoes” to the Chief Keef-evoking “Shake Yo Dreads,” her music resonates with anyone willing to engage with and embrace their ratchet side.
Unlike many of her female peers, Sexyy’s raps aren’t drenched in metaphors and punchlines; her lyrics sound as if she’s saying the very first thing that pops into her head — which is exactly the case. When she spits, “B-tch, if it’s some beef, let me know, sh-t, what’s up?/All that talkin’ on the net, that’s gon’ get your head bust,” in “I’m the Sh-t,” Sexyy isn’t weaving subliminal shots throughout intricate wordplay — she’s plainly addressing her opps with equal parts humor, apathy and stone-cold seriousness.
According to Luminate, Hood Hottest Princess has collected 447.6 million official on-demand U.S. streams, helping it reach No. 13 on the Top Rap Albums chart, as well as making appearances on Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums (No. 21) and the Billboard 200 (No. 62). Sexyy has charted a pair of top 10s on the Mainstream R&B/Hip-Hop Airplay ranking: “SkeeYee” (No. 6) and “Rich Baby Daddy” (No. 2), with the former also becoming the inaugural No. 1 hit on the newly launched TikTok Billboard Top 50.
This digital cover story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
Sexyy dominated 2023 amid a notable lull for her genre overall in the marketplace. Last year, no hip-hop artist topped the Billboard 200 until mid-July, when Lil Uzi Vert’s Pink Tape became the first No. 1 hip-hop album since Metro Boomin’s Heroes & Villains the previous December, marking the longest gap between No. 1 hip-hop albums since a 34-week drought in 1992-93. In September, Doja Cat’s “Paint the Town Red” became hip-hop’s first Billboard Hot 100-topping single since Nicki Minaj’s “Super Freaky Girl” in August 2022.
Both “Paint the Town Red” and Pink Tape were buoyed by the danceable, top 40-friendly sounds of pop-rap and Jersey club, respectively, signaling a shift from the 2010s, when dominant trap artists regularly launched new singles and albums to the tops of Billboard’s marquee all-genre charts. While Sexyy didn’t make quite the commercial impact of “Paint the Town Red” or Uzi’s “Just Wanna Rock,” her remarkable string of 2023 hits suggests hip-hop may evolve in a new direction: one in which less crossover-aimed rap can still captivate the culture, and in which a woman with Sexyy’s raw, raucous style can achieve mainstream dominance without a top 40-friendly hit.
Born Janae Wherry, Sexyy grew up in St. Louis listening to the likes of Webbie, Boosie BadAzz and Trina — artists that embody the unapologetically hood energy that now courses through every Sexyy Red song. As Sexyy points out, they were all revered for their fearlessness. But achieving that kind of bravery herself took some time.
“When I was little, I always knew [I was a star] because I was just different,” Sexyy says. “I was worried. I was quiet. But everybody used to want to be my friend. I was pretty, my hair was real long, my mama knew how to dress me. Everybody used to just be flocking to me, but I was shy. I didn’t want to talk to nobody. I’ve always been that person for real.”
Michael Tyrone Delaney
That kind of authenticity is now helping her fans access their own — one two-and-a-half-minute track at a time. From the start, Sexyy’s career has felt organic and, at first, low stakes. Growing up, she always had a creative spirit: “I used to think I was going to be a painter. I used to design my Barbie dolls’ clothes. I used to be doing hair. I just was multitalented, so I knew I could do it, but I just didn’t know how,” she says.
When a former boyfriend broke her heart in 2018, Sexyy reacted in the most hip-hop way possible: She recorded a dis track. The response among friends was so overwhelmingly positive that even the song’s subject encouraged her to seriously pursue music. (“He’d have me rap the song to his friends,” Sexyy recalls.)
From that very first song, listeners clamored to hear Sexyy’s specific voice, her cadence, her energy, her off-the-cuff rambunctiousness tempered with sincerity. Performances at local clubs and parties soon followed — “A free party? And I get $50 just to go up there and just do something? Why not?” — as did a debut mixtape, 2021’s Ghetto Superstar, and support on social media from R&B star Summer Walker. But it took a mixture of old-school grind and new-school social media prowess — and a little help from the music industry — for Sexyy to harness the zeitgeist.
In 2021, Rebel Music, an independent Miami-based label and management company, signed Sexyy after coming across some of her early tracks. “Once she got off the plane and I heard her voice, I knew she was a star,” recalls Vladimir “Sunny” Laurent, Sexyy’s A&R executive. “Like, her voice, it just tells you who she is.” By mid-2023, Miami-based distributor Open Shift and gamma — Larry Jackson’s media company that creates, distributes and markets content with a specific focus on Black culture — “reached out to [Rebel] and expressed interest not only in Sexyy, but their broad platform [too],” according to Dave Gross, who became Sexyy’s manager around the same time. (Sexyy remains signed to Rebel Music, while gamma and Open Shift handle distribution of her music.)
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In January 2023, Sexyy Red dropped the track that would change the course of her career. “Pound Town” is emblematic of Sexyy’s ethos: Say what you feel, and do that before anything else. From “too many b-tches, where the n—as at?” to “My c–chie pink, my bootyh–e brown,” her impulsive bars quickly drew listeners in, inspiring a litany of memes across TikTok and X (formerly Twitter).
The track also brought “p—y rap” — which music journalist Robyn Mowatt describes as “a subgenre of rap where women embrace their sexual prowess” in the face of “the patriarchy and misogyny” common in the male-dominated rap world — to the fore of hip-hop discourse. As female MCs have seized the mainstream, p—y rap has dominated, with Sexyy as one of its most prominent purveyors — even if she disputes the classification.
“I don’t agree with that [classification], because why is that the only thing you heard me talking about?” she says. “That’s the only thing that you got out of everything I just said? You just heard me say ‘c–chie’? I hate when they say that. I just rap about my daily life. Girls that live like me, I just rap about what we go through. I don’t sit and talk about c–chie all day.”
She’s right. What has made Sexyy such a contentious subject of hip-hop conversations is that she embodies an energy and perspective many are comfortable glamorizing without respecting. In lyrics like “When I don’t hear from my n—a, I write him/He a bad boy, I don’t care, that’s how I like ’em/Yeah, free my n—a ’til it’s backwards/F–k the police, f–k the pigs, they some bastards,” she’s not conjuring a scene to give the illusion of a hood aesthetic — she’s literally pulling from her real life.
“Authenticity is self-relative, and for Sexyy, it’s that she’s independent, fierce, strong, unafraid of the world’s opinions and unbowed by backlash,” Gross says. It’s not about whether she’s acting “hood” — it’s about expressing those qualities and aesthetics authentically in her music and performance. Sexyy is always being Sexyy, first and foremost.
“Pound Town” peaked at No. 66 on the Billboard Hot 100 following a remix with Nicki Minaj, marking Sexyy’s debut on the chart. “I specifically had the vision to make sure that we got that done and out by Memorial Day weekend so that we could just own the f–king summer,” says gamma CEO Larry Jackson, who was instrumental in orchestrating the remix. “That, to me, was like throwing a lit match in dry shrubbery.”
As scores of streaming-era artists know well, it is easy for a viral hit to overshadow the artist behind it. Sexyy Red and her team sought to avoid that, Jackson says, delivering a constant stream of singles and remixes to support Hood Hottest Princess. The project arrived alongside the official single release of “SkeeYee,” a raucous party anthem named after a cat-calling phrase frequently used in Sexyy’s hometown of St. Louis.
“SkeeYee” quickly became a staple on locker room playlists across the country, the go-to celebration song for athletes from college football’s Ole Miss Rebels to MLB’s Baltimore Orioles. Its success shifted Sexyy into a different tier from her peers like Kaliii and Flo Milli. Most mainstream female rappers are ignored by straight male audiences save for a verse or two, but Sexyy had that demographic captivated for an entire calendar year — from the countless videos of ecstatic male fans at her festival appearances to Travis Scott’s giddy embrace of “SkeeYee” during his 2023 Wireless Festival set.
“She’s the female Gucci [Mane]. She sounds like Trina. Everybody thinks she’s like a p—y rap artist, but she’s not really,” Laurent says. “She makes music for dudes who like fast cars. That’s why dudes connect with her so well. Everybody loves her, from the LGBT community to [straight] women — it’s all walks of life.”
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“Hellcats SRTs” (along with its Lil Durk remix) and “Shake Yo Dreads” added two more hits to Sexyy’s résumé, and smart features on NLE Choppa’s “Slut Me Out” and DaBaby’s “Shake Sumn” kept her momentum going. In 2023, ratchet party rap reemerged in popularity, and Sexyy led the charge with music and energy reminiscent of iconic voices like Waka Flocka Flame and Chief Keef. “I see Sexyy Red as a female me,” Waka says. “How people are like, ‘Man, Waka’s music just ratchet!’ It was records outselling me by millions of copies, but they can never get played inside the club.”
Neither “Pound Town” nor “SkeeYee” was a major Hot 100 hit, reaching Nos. 66 and 62, respectively, but they still captured and defined the year for large swaths of consumers; Sexyy landed six entries on the TikTok Billboard Top 50. And after her hit linkup with Minaj, she spent the rest of 2023 maximizing her commercial reach by collaborating with another Young Money icon.
According to Gross, Drake reached out to Sexyy via DM around the time the rest of the industry began to truly take notice of her. So, between supporting Moneybagg Yo on his Larger Than Life Tour and headlining her own Hood Hottest Princess tour, Sexyy opened for Drake and 21 Savage’s blockbuster It’s All a Blur Tour. That cross-country trek set the stage for Sexyy’s highest-peaking Hot 100 entry yet, “Rich Baby Daddy” (No. 11), a track from Drake’s For All the Dogs album that also features fellow St. Louis native SZA. “Rich Baby Daddy” also became her most beloved track yet (by critics and fans alike), on an album that also featured heavy hitters from Bad Bunny to J. Cole — an indicator of how quickly Sexyy had risen in the industry.
Her stint on Drake and 21 Savage’s tour also laid the groundwork for her own headlining tour, which her team estimates sold 75,000 tickets across 28 shows — a rare feat for a female rapper, especially one so new to the game, and a testament to the strength of the Sexyy Red brand in a year that had numerous cancellations of hip-hop tours and festivals.
“Touring was stressful at first, because nobody knew I was pregnant,” Sexyy explains. “I’d be in the bedroom trying to suck my stomach in or wear clothes to show I wasn’t. It hurt to just be onstage all day holding your stomach. It’s hard to hide it.” For an artist like Sexyy, deeply committed to presenting herself authentically, the decision to do that was deeply personal, and tactical: She shot more than 10 music videos, made several festival appearances, went on three tours and performed at awards shows — and did most of that while carrying her second child.
“Being pregnant is stressful; it wears your body down. I was tired, but I tried to hide it as much as you possibly could,” she says. “I like to have a personal life. I’m already famous or whatever, so everything be out there. I be trying to have something to myself that I could keep. Just go home and be with my son and my family. That’s the reason I was hiding.”
Michael Tyrone Delaney
Gross recalls one summer stint in which Sexyy “hopped off the stage with Drake, hopped on a jet to make it to a Moneybagg Yo show, did an afterparty after the Moneybagg show, then at six or seven in the morning took another jet to go the next city where the Drake tour was.” That kind of work ethic is what drew him to Sexyy in the first place.
It’s the same energy Sexyy started the year with after the father of her baby got locked up. “I don’t got no more distractions. I can work now,” she says. After every show, she went straight to her 2-year-old son, Chuckie — a testament to how she manages to balance work with her personal life. “This year was very unique and there was an extremely heightened sense of concern” around the impact of Sexyy’s promotional schedule on her mind and body, Gross says. “Our game plan is always going to be to take our cue from the artist.”
As quickly as she has become a pop cultural touchstone, Sexyy has stirred up plenty of controversy. In October on the podcast This Past Weekend With Theo Von, she said, “Trump, we miss you” — arguing that “they support him in the hood” because “he started getting Black people out of jail and giving people that free money.” One conspiracy theory accuses her of being a plant by the CIA to destroy the Black community, while some posts on X have called for Jackson’s condemnation to hell because of his involvement in promoting Sexyy.
For Sexyy, wanting to be in the rap game for the long haul has meant finding a way to exist amid all that noise. “It don’t really faze me, because I know what’s going on in real life,” she says. “I just do me. I be really nice.” And, in real life, Sexyy is connecting with audiences because she’s giving them the space to revel in their ratchetness. “In my opinion, she is the first one post-pandemic who brought us a hot summer,” Jackson says. “She dropped music that made us feel good for the first time in four years about being outside again.”
“I think she’s every woman’s spirit animal. That rambunctious girl that says anything she feels. She says things people are afraid to say,” adds Laurent. “She’s like a heroine in a way.”
In 2024, Sexyy Red has one goal: “I’m showing my ass. I’m going to just be getting richer, bigger, more trendier. I’m going to be everywhere,” she says. “I’m going to be in it for the long haul, [but] not even on purpose, though. Even if I try to stop rapping, they’re going to take some sh-t, turn it into something, put me on the blogs, make it something it doesn’t even have to be, so Imma be here for a minute.” Her manager is aiming for “three or four albums next year. That might be ambitious,” he acknowledges. “But I want 2024 to be the year of Sexyy Red like 2023 was.”
Michael Tyrone Delaney
In December, she dropped a deluxe edition of Hood Hottest Princess featuring collaborations with Chief Keef and Summer Walker, and she has also scored rising hits in “Bow Bow Bow (F My Baby Dad)” and “Free My N—a.” The negative response to the latter in particular — some critics contended that the song and music video contributed to the glorification of the incarceration of Black men — exemplified the vitriol that has moved some veteran female rappers to defend Sexyy.
“We don’t know what [Sexyy is] going to be talking about on the third or fourth album, but right now we’re talking about where we came from,” Trina tells Billboard. “We’re talking about the bottom. The gutter, the trenches, the dirt, the slime, the scum. All of that. Some people have just grown above it and they’re not in the hood no more, but everybody has not got to that place yet. You can’t expect them to be talking about the most lavish things in life and they haven’t addressed where they from and what they’ve seen and how they seen it. Give them a chance to grow. Give them a chance to elevate. Give them a chance to evolve. They’re still young women. They’re still under 30 years old. They still have time to do whatever they want to do, but this is just the beginning.”
Sexyy’s vision and hope for hip-hop’s future is centered in the same principle she has upheld since “Pound Town” blew up: authenticity. For her, that’s the only way to know “who really f–king with you when you’re just being yourself and not trying to pretend.”
And for her heroes — like Boosie BadAzz, the only artist she requested to hear during her Billboard photo shoot other than herself — it’s the reason her voice is so needed in rap right now. Sexyy is “a girl from the hood who finally got her chance to speak and it’s accepted,” Boosie says. “When I listen to her music, it’s like the girls from my project talking. You got to respect it or watch other people respect it. We got a voice, too. The hood has a voice, too. A lot of people don’t respect it because they don’t understand it.”
Perhaps that’s what the future of hip-hop looks like under a Sexyy Red dynasty: a scene where a young woman can captivate a nation with her own perspective and narrative while also giving a voice to the place some of the culture’s most overlooked movers and shakers come from — and where none of that is just a performance. As usual, Sexyy puts it best herself: “I’m just doing me in this rap sh-t.”
A packed crowd writhes along to the buzzing beats thundering from the speakers. It’s a warm Wednesday night in November, and onstage at Brooklyn’s Baby’s All Right, 23-year-old Houston-based producer Odetari is performing one of his first shows. The 300 or so people assembled range from the middle-aged to young adults to actual children — several of whom are perched on their parents’ shoulders and shouting the lyrics to songs like “I LOVE U HOE,” “GOOD LOYAL THOTS” and Odetari’s latest, “GMFU,” an acronym for “got me f–ked up.”
This lattermost track is a collaboration with 6arely Human, a 22-year-old electronic artist from Fort Worth, Texas, whose own shows are similarly hectic and whose audience is similarly age-agnostic. Since its July release, “GMFU” — a dark, thumping anthem about “going dumb” from partying — has accumulated 91.9 million on-demand official U.S. streams, according to Luminate. (Their second collaboration, “Level Up,” arrived Jan. 8.) Odetari’s catalog has racked up 475.4 million on-demand official U.S. streams — a number that swells to 612.6 million when including data from user-generated content on platforms like TikTok — and he has clocked 11 entries on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart in 2023. 6arely Human’s catalog has 67 million official on-demand streams, ballooning to 96.5 million with UGC.
On a recent Friday afternoon in Los Angeles, Odetari and 6arely Human make an eye-catching pair: the former in bulky streetwear, his new grills twinkling when he flashes a wide, easy smile; the latter sporting a pink corset, black platform boots, an enviable black velvet duster and perfectly applied black lipstick adding up to a look that evokes both the rave world and of his two biggest inspirations, Kesha and Lady Gaga.
Until this past August, 6arely Human was managing a Panera Bread, slinging bagels by day and spending his nights making music, clothing and TikToks. And until earlier this year, Odetari was a substitute teacher, a gig he says he did purely “for the paycheck.” Now, both electronic producers are TikTok stars, but they’re making significant IRL inroads as well. In 2023, both signed with Artist Partner Group, and they’ll take their high-powered — if not yet totally polished — shows on the road in 2024.
“Our role is to challenge, inspire, support and remove friction points on the path to success,” says APG founder and CEO Mike Caren, who notes that consistency is key to turning internet stardom into more tangible success. “They have the talent, uniqueness, work ethic and originality to achieve huge goals.”
This digital cover story is part of Billboard’s Genre Now package, highlighting the artists pushing their musical genres forward — and even creating their own new ones.
Despite the lyrical content of their music (“Don’t cheat me/Believe me/I am a f–king c–t,” 6arely Human announces on “GMFU”), there’s a sense of purity about both acts. They represent a nascent style of extremely online dance music, defined by woozy productions that speed up, slow down and generally capture the sound of the global online dance community from which they hail, the DIY vibe of the early rave era and the ultra-modern world of TikTok stardom. APG senior director of A&R Andre Herd, who signed 6arely Human, says that the producer “stood out from the crowd of internet artists because he had been building an in-person fan base through underground raves and parties.”
The electronic scene has always been cobbled together from many niche genres and sounds. Together, Odetari and 6arely Human are continuing that tradition while pushing it further — making music forged online that’s now transcending the internet, translating to very real popularity.
6arelyhuman photographed on December 1, 2023 in Los Angeles.
Michael Buckner
Tell me about the first time one of your songs went viral.
Odetari: I always kind of knew that going viral on TikTok, especially with music, is usually a one-time thing if you don’t do it right. The first song [of mine that] went viral [2023’s “Narcissistic Personality Disorder”] hit 256,000 streams in a day, which was crazy to me, because I had never passed 10,000 on a song. I saw how fast it went up and got really excited, but I tried to tell myself, “Don’t get too excited, because you don’t know if this could drop.” Then the next day it dropped by half. So, I was like, “What do I do next? I have to keep this momentum going.” It was like a roller coaster.
What was your strategy when you saw the numbers go down by half?
Odetari: Just rapid-fire dropping [of new music]. Whatever worked for that first thing, you’ve got to keep doing that again and again [while expanding your catalog]. The song that went viral was mostly beats, so the next songs were filled with actual structure and lyrics, so there was steady replay value. That’s what I just kept doing.
6arely Human: I relate to him. My first viral song was also doing this up and down thing. But it started to really go [up] when I would see a bunch of videos from people that were creating things and making edits with their own ideas with the song. I remember specifically that one of the things that helped a lot was a [fan-made] South Park edit [that played the song “Hands up!” over images from the show]. [Virality] is a lot about what people do with the song once it comes out.
Odetari: Also, a lot of people making music similar to ours were not showing their faces. We definitely made sure to also attach [our] image to [the music], because a lot of songs that blow up on TikTok, people will scroll and hear the song, but they don’t really care about it or the person who made it. I feel like we really nailed it on that, [by each of us] attaching [our] images and connecting with the fans.
You’re both from Texas. How much of what you make is a product of where you’re from versus from being on the internet?
6arely Human: A lot of my inspiration is definitely from the internet, but I feel like there’s something about where you’re from that you put into your music, and it just adds the salt and pepper element. There is that little Texas spice.
What specifically makes it Texas?
6arely Human: The way I say things on a song, and the words I use. I don’t know if everyone’s going to be saying “y’all” on an electronic song, but it sounds cool.
Odetari: I definitely have influence from Houston, especially with the slow, chopped-and-screwed stuff. A lot of my music slows down toward the end. When I was growing up, I looked up to Travis Scott. Me and his sister went to the same school, and we were pretty close friends. She kind of took me along the journey when he was first starting, going backstage and stuff. Seeing where he was with [debut solo 2013 mixtape] Owl Pharaoh to where he is now just really shaped a lot of the things I want in life.
Odetari photographed on December 1, 2023 in Los Angeles.
Michael Buckner
Let’s talk about the sound of your music itself — because sure, it’s electronic, but it’s something else, too. What do you both call your sounds?
6arely Human: I call mine “sassy scene.” Sassy Scene was [the name of] my first album, and a lot of the songs that were on that project had a similar sound. The word “sassy” is just the feeling you get listening to it, and then “scene,” that could mean the style, because there’s different subcultures of the way that people dress that connect to the music. “Scene” is the community as well, because there’s a lot of people that make similar stuff. Everyone’s making up different words for it — the most common one is obviously “hyperpop.” And then “scene core,” “crush club.”
Odetari: Some people call it “sigilkore.” I call my stuff “Odecore,” but I would just categorize it under electronic dance music.
What are the characteristics of the people in your scene who are consuming your music and making similar music?
6arely Human: There are really colorful outfits; a lot of people love the fur [raver] legging things. I see those a lot, and then arm warmers and a lot of accessories — fur and pink. Scene fashion is almost emo, too, that kind of mixes with ravers.
Is this scene happening everywhere? Or is it centralized in Texas? Or is it mostly on the internet?
Odetari: It’s really well respected in the U.S., but overseas they really love it. Poland and Germany, where they have those underground raves that just go crazy, I feel like they’re the ones that really like it. They really get it.
What do your shows look and feel like?
6arely Human: Very lively. There’s a lot of energy. It’s mostly younger people, but there are also people that maybe get a nostalgic feeling, too [for the early rave days]. There is a wide range of people. Everyone’s really excited, and it’s really fun, honestly.
Odetari: Sometimes you have to scream in the mic. They’ll scream over you. They know the lyrics. They’re really dedicated. It’s an awesome fan base for shows. The age range is pretty wide.
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Within your scene, is there a particular worldview or set of values or a philosophy?
6arely Human: I’m not sure about that one.
Odetari: It’s so new, so we’re learning it, too. It kind of goes back to everyone who has made similar music to ours but never shows their face. They’ve never really taken it to a performance level. We’re some of the first to be performing music like this, so we’re figuring out what the best way to do that is. It’s experimental.
Have there been hits and misses in translating your music to a live setting?
6arely Human: For sure. Some of my songs are sped up a little bit, and it’s hard to key the music, too, if you’re using live Auto-Tune. Everyone’s doing the sped-up thing, or slowed down, or even both.
Odetari: My music speeds up, then slows down and then is normal. For performances, it’s not ideal unless you do a DJ set, I guess. But again, we’re figuring it out.
6arely Human: A lot of the people that are there at the live shows, I feel like sometimes they just want to see you on the stage singing. Even if you’re not giving the best vocals in the world, they just love the song so much that they just want to see you up there having fun as well.
Since you’re both so deeply online, maybe it’s just exciting for people to see that you both actually exist. Do you feel like underground acts?
Odetari: I don’t know. The numbers are not really underground.
6arely Human: I feel like we were, but since everything happened rather quickly it hasn’t really hit me yet.
Odetari: It hasn’t hit me, either.
Do you see yourselves performing in arenas, or is the preference sweaty underground warehouses?
6arely Human: I don’t know about arenas. You never know. Maybe. But I really do like smaller, intimate shows. They’re more fun. I love jumping in the crowd, starting mosh pits.
Odetari: A 2,000-[capacity venue], those are really the best shows.
Odetari & 6arelyhuman photographed on December 1, 2023 in Los Angeles.
Michael Buckner
What do your friends and family back in Texas make of your success?
6arely Human: A lot of people don’t know. A lot of people where I live might not be as tuned in with internet stuff. I don’t know how to explain, like, “Oh, yeah, we just made this in our room and then put it on an app called TikTok and now we’re here.” It’s weird to explain to people that don’t really get the internet.
Obviously, a lot of electronic music is made for parties. How much do you connect to that partying aspect of the electronic world?
6arely Human: The type of music we make is something people can just have fun to and not really think about everything else that’s happening. Our type of music, whenever you play it, people just want to jump around and have fun and go crazy.
Odetari: You don’t even need to know the lyrics. You can just vibe to it.
Do you feel connected to other realms of the dance music world?
Odetari: I personally don’t, because I really don’t listen to music. I only listen to video-game soundtracks now, so I really don’t know what’s going on in music that much. I think it helps me not get too influenced by anything.
6arely Human: I feel the same way. Anything that’s new, it’s probably just me listening to my friends or someone I actually know. Most of the music I listen to and take inspiration from is really old. From, like, 2010 or 1998.
“I forgot to wear the knee pads,” Karol G says ruefully. “I’m going to have scrapes.”
She beams. For a soaking wet pop star who has just been dragged through a shallow pool, Karol looks remarkably happy.
Moments before, a group of writhing, shirtless male dancers had lifted Karol, dressed in a white bikini and transparent baggy pants, high above the water as she performed a medley of songs from her unprecedented past year in music, including material from her chart-topping February album, Mañana Será Bonito; the edgier August follow-up, Mañana Será Bonito (Bichota Season); and a small teaser of her new single with Kali Uchis, “Labios Mordidos.” Her arms knifed back-and-forth through the pool in fierce synchronicity with her platoon of dancers — all water-drenched sexiness, but a punishing physical routine nonetheless. After Karol dries off, wrings out her pants and gets her glam touched up, she’ll do it all over again.
“I want it to be spectacular,” she says matter-of-factly of the roughly four-minute Billboard Latin Music Awards performance. To that end, she enlisted renowned choreographer Parris Goebel, whose work includes Rihanna’s Super Bowl halftime show performance, to continue pushing her as a dancer. “Dance doesn’t come so easy to me,” Karol admits. “To do the things I do, I have to rehearse a lot.” Earlier this year, Goebel choreographed Karol’s MTV Video Music Awards performance.
“She understands what I want to express in my movements, and also, she gets something out of me that I’m still in the process of understanding,” Karol says. “I’ve learned a lot about myself this year. Even though it would seem I’ve arrived at a point where I could relax and let things run, life keeps showing me that I’ve still got a lot of things to do, a lot of things to give.”
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Twenty-four hours later, Karol is calm (and dry) in a quiet Los Angeles studio, talking with her usual expressiveness and candor in sentences punctuated by crescendos, accents and exclamations and augmented by enthusiastic gesticulations. In her many music videos, Karol usually presents one of two ways. There’s the bichota, or badass, sexy and powerful and not afraid to show it. And then there’s the smiling (or occasionally melancholy) girl next door who enjoys celebrating love and doesn’t shy from displays of vulnerability. In person, the young woman born Carolina García in Medellín, Colombia, is all those things, but she’s also warm, exuberant and disarmingly earnest, a demeanor that has remained intact through my many encounters with her over the years, even as her popularity has soared.
Her hair is pulled back in a tousled ponytail, its platinum color matching the short, clingy silk dress that shows off her sculpted physique. At 32 years old, Karol has worked hard to look like this. Earlier this year, her doctor prescribed an eating plan to alleviate a long-standing colon disorder; at the same time, after a lifetime of exercising, she upped her training regime to be able to perform for three hours in a stadium. “I wanted to be healthy, and I needed to do a ton of cardio for the shows. And my body began to change,” she says. “It was beautiful because I’d always been told certain changes took time, and it was true.”
You could say the same of Karol’s upward career trajectory. She just wrapped an extraordinary year in which she became the first Latina woman (and second artist ever) to top the Billboard 200 with an all-Spanish-language album (Mañana Será Bonito); the top female Latin artist on Billboard’s year-end charts (behind only Bad Bunny and Peso Pluma); and the winner of album of the year at November’s Latin Grammys, as well as urban album of the year — the first woman to win the latter.
Karol is also the first Latina (and still one of only a few women) to headline a global stadium tour and the highest-grossing Latin touring artist of the year by far. According to Billboard Boxscore, in 2023, she grossed $146.9 million from just 19 shows and sold 843,000 tickets through Nov. 19, almost doubling the $86.7 million the Latin runner-up, RBD, grossed from 18 shows in the same period.
Karol G photographed November 11, 2023 at The Powder Room Studio in Los Angeles. Balenciaga jacket, Intimissimi underwear, Replika Vintage shoes.
Vijat Mohindra
Beyond her accolades — or perhaps, more accurately, behind them — is Karol’s shrewd business sense. Her long-standing recording agreement with Universal Music Latino, which signed her to her first major deal in 2016, ended after Mañana Será Bonito came out in February. Instead of re-upping or accepting any of the “incredible” deals she says other labels offered, she launched her own Bichota Records, invested in its staff and infrastructure — much of it based in her native Colombia — and inked a distribution deal with Interscope that provides her with that company’s full, multinational support and staff but lets her keep her masters moving forward, including Bichota Season’s.
“We wanted to stay in the Universal family,” says Noah Assad, who has managed Karol since 2020, now through his Habibi Management. “They’re the ones who bet on her in the beginning, and we believe in longevity. No one knows an artist more than the infrastructure who had you in the beginning.”
Even so, he adds, “She was ready to build her own label, her own structure, her own team. She was already betting on herself without getting the gain. Independence is not just being independent; she had to build this whole infrastructure. Not every artist is made for independence, but knowing that she could [be] made it the right decision.”
Landing Karol, says Interscope executive vp Nir Seroussi, came from “a very practical conversation that I had with [manager and friend] Noah, asking, ‘What do you want?’ And he said, ‘She’s a boss. She wants to feel empowered, and she’s ambitious. She wants to have a seat at the table with the Billie Eilishes and the Olivia [Rodrigos] of the world.’ ”
Karol’s message to the label, Seroussi recalls, was clear: “I’ve come this far. I want more. I want to sit next to general-market artists because that’s how I feel: Latina but with an A-league fan base.”
But as she eyes mainstream global stardom, Karol is, as usual, prepared to be patient.
“It’s a fine line,” she notes. “In that rush to go global, music can lose its essence. So we’re going step by step. Yes, they’ve brought proposals [to the table], but I’m not in a rush. It would be amazing to fill stadiums in Asia, for example, but I truly feel happy and thankful with what I’m doing today. We’ll find the way.”
In an era of ever more rapid rises to stardom for Latin artists — witness Peso Pluma and, before him, Bad Bunny — Karol G’s ascent has been steady but slow, even laborious, and compounded by being a woman in a Latin world where female-led hits historically are scant. She started as a child pop act, competing on Colombia’s X Factor at 14, and didn’t hail from the barrio but from a solid middle-class family. When reggaetón descended on her native Medellín, she got hooked, but pursuing a career in the genre presented additional hurdles: She started recording and performing it at a time when men completely dominated the genre — as they still do — and she was considered an oddity, facing a highly skeptical industry: Aside from Ivy Queen a generation before, there weren’t any other women to measure her against.
But alongside her producer/co-writer Ovy on the Drums, Karol developed a sound — melodic, lyrically conversational, sparsely arranged and open to experimentation — that was very much geared toward women, touching on themes of empowerment and vulnerability with a genuinely personal point of view and embracing sexuality without being too overtly sexual. Stars like Nicky Jam and J Balvin endorsed her and recorded with her, and in 2016, Universal signed her.
“People got ‘married’ to Karol G,” says Raymond Acosta, head of talent management for Habibi, which also represents Bad Bunny, Eladio Carrión and Mora. “Her fans, even when they disagree with her, see her as a sister. For many of them, she’s not simply an artist. She’s family.”
A prolific, and by all accounts tireless recording artist, Karol built her fan base by being sincere on social media, by constantly releasing music and by maintaining a clear, consistent vision of who she was and what she wanted. Her debut album, 2017’s Unstoppable, released when she was 26, debuted at No. 2 on Billboard’s Top Latin Albums chart, back when she had 3.5 million Instagram followers; today, she has 70 million.
Her first big hits were collaborations with men, beginning with “Ahora Me Llama” with Bad Bunny in 2017, which peaked at No. 10 on Hot Latin Songs. Her first No. 1 was 2018’s “Dame Tu Cosita,” alongside El Chombo and Pitbull. By then, Karol had been at Universal for three years without a massive hit of her own. All around her, reggaetoneros were scoring quick Hot Latin Songs No. 1s, even as she relentlessly released music; to date, she has logged 60 entries on the multimetric chart, the most for a Latin female artist.
“I started in 2006, and now it’s 2023,” says Karol bluntly. “My first songs were 15, 16 years ago. You spend all that time working and thinking, ‘When is my time?’ People on social media always show the goal: the cars, the money, the luxury goods, and everyone at home is thinking, ‘Why doesn’t that happen to me?’ But it’s not that easy. Everything has a process. Yes, I sometimes had doubts, but if I didn’t do this, what was I going to do? I am music. Every time anything happens to me, I want to write a song. Everything for me is a song.”
Tiffany Brown catsuit and jacket, Retrofête x Keren Wolf earrings.
Vijat Mohindra
Finally, in fall 2019, she released the song: “Tusa,” a track about getting over heartbreak, which she wrote with Ovy on the Drums and Keityn and recorded with Nicki Minaj. It spent four weeks at No. 1 on Hot Latin Songs, underscoring Karol’s status as a Latin artist to contend with, who could collaborate with a top American rapper, while cementing her place as a woman who could relate to other women, tell their stories, voice their concerns, vent for them. (It also established the potent trifecta of Karol, Ovy and Keityn, which has since churned out a succession of chart-topping hits including the No. 1s “Provenza” and “TQG” with Shakira.)
“As a woman, she has always had a very clear notion of her identity and what she wants to tell fans, and she has taken that female power to the next level, making women feel like bichotas,” says Ovy, referring to the title of the global Karol hit that has become synonymous with female power. “She has always been very clear about what she wants to musically show the world, and as her producer from day one, I’ve always understood every move she makes. Anything she has in her mind, I turn into music.”
There is a definite line between stardom and superstardom, and for several years, Karol G inched ever closer to the latter, yet didn’t quite reach it. She played clubs, festivals, shows throughout Latin America, anything to be seen, but never had a proper routed headlining tour. Still, her second album, 2019’s Ocean, debuted at No. 2 on Top Latin Albums, and she became the top Latin female artist on Billboard’s year-end charts, a spot she has maintained ever since. She also toured the United States for the first time as a guest on Gloria Trevi’s 21-date Diosa de la Noche trek.
In 2021, she got her first Top Latin Albums No. 1 with her intensely personal KG0516 and launched her first headlining tour, playing theaters. The Bichota Tour — named after the single but by now synonymous with Karol herself — grossed $15.4 million, sold 214,000 tickets and opened Karol’s eyes to possibilities she hadn’t seriously considered. A major catalyst was the icy blue wigs — matching Karol’s hair color on the album cover and her cold, vulnerable state of mind — that fans took to wearing to the shows, an unprecedented display of fandom for a Latin artist.
“I think it was the way each person connected more closely with me,” Karol reflects. “It wasn’t just the blue wigs. I noticed [later] so many people changing their hair color in step with me. I thought it was extraordinary how a hair color can define a moment in your life.”
More importantly, “I realized that, thank God, this Karol G thing was a family and not a moment. I felt these people were there with me and would always be there, no matter what,” she says earnestly. Reading social media comments guided her. Fans who had seen her years before in a club now wanted to see her in a theater. “I began to understand there was a connection. When someone came and said, ‘I think you’re ready to do arenas,’ I thought, ‘Why not? If 3,000 people saw me in a theater, it means there are 12,000 more people who didn’t see me. Let’s go sell arenas.’ ”
Paumé Los Angeles bodysuit, Jimmy Choo shoes.
Vijat Mohindra
The ensuing $trip Love arena tour in 2022 grossed $72.2 million and sold 424,000 tickets. Which again made Karol and her team consider bigger venues — in this case, stadiums.
“It’s sort of mind-boggling to sit here in early November 2023 and think that in November 2021 she was starting her first headline tour of North America ever,” says UTA partner Jbeau Lewis, booking agent for Karol and Bad Bunny, among others. “The fact that she headlined predominantly theaters in 2021, then arenas in 2022, then jumped to stadiums in 2023 is unprecedented for any genre. I think it’s easy to talk about Karol as a leader in Latin music, but based on the success she has had, especially in this year, she should be spoken about in the same breath as Taylor or Beyoncé.”
A year ago, Karol and her team weren’t even contemplating a stadium tour. The plan was to finish the arena tour in 2022, release Mañana Será Bonito in February 2023 and take a break — as much for herself as for her fans, who had seen her tour two years in a row — save for three Puerto Rico stadium shows in early March.
Then, Mañana Será Bonito exploded. When Karol played the first of the three Puerto Rico dates, she included a handful of the album’s songs, accompanied by her guitarist. Fans clamored for more, and by the third date, she was performing the entire album — and fans were singing along to every word.
“At that point, I realized I had to be very, very aware of what was happening with this music,” she says. After playing three stadium dates where fans knew all her brand-new material, she felt the moment was ripe for her to hit the road again.
A Karol G concert is a bit of a spiritual experience, one that unites multiple generations of Latin women under a single roof. Grandmothers and children cry in unison; professional women let their hair down and wear different-colored wigs. And in a twist, men know the songs, too.
“The most beautiful thing about my shows is people arrive with the intention to heal,” Karol says. “Their intentions are so beautiful that when I go onstage and all that energy is directed toward me, I feel like a battery that’s recharging and filling up, and sometimes I cry a lot in my shows. I try not to, but my heart feels like it’s going to burst.”
Replika Vintage bra, BIG HORN eyewear, Paumé Los Angeles bracelets and earrings.
Vijat Mohindra
After her arena tour, Karol had been able to summon the same energy for her Puerto Rico stadium shows. Now the challenge was to extend that into a full stadium tour.
“The first step was sitting down and making the decision to do stadiums. This was the subject of a lot of discussion with my team. Someone said, ‘You’re going to play stadiums? Beyoncé plays stadiums. Taylor Swift plays stadiums. Are you ready for that?’ I said, ‘No, I’m not ready. But I will be.’ ”
Her team crunched numbers and came up with six safe markets. Those six dates quickly became nine when New York, Los Angeles and Miami sold out and second dates had to be added. From there, the tour mushroomed to 16 dates in 13 cities.
Less than the team being resistant to the tour, Lewis says, “It just wasn’t the plan. Generally speaking, when you go out and tour in stadiums, you need 18 months to a year to execute. We made the decision in March to go out on tour in August, with a very short runway. But all of the signals were there. There was such demand. Rolling immediately into second nights in Los Angeles, Miami and New York was incredible, and that gave the team confidence to say, ‘Let’s add more cities to this tour.’ Then doing things like her headlining Lollapalooza and coming back six weeks later in Chicago and selling 52,000 tickets in Soldier Field, that’s really unprecedented.”
For Karol, the crash course of preparing to play stadiums came with intense pressure: Not only would she be performing for crowds of 50,000 or more, she would be doing it during the same summer as the Renaissance and Eras tours. “Karol G couldn’t be the one who looked like she had no business doing it,” she says.
“It was an enormous personal challenge, from how I looked, to how I thought, to how I put it together,” she continues. “I didn’t feel I was ready until I saw the videos from the first two dates. I always judge myself horribly, and nothing is exactly how I want it. But in this tour, as a woman, I played the videos and said, ‘Wow, I love what I see.’ ”
Incorporating new music presented its own challenge. Soon after announcing the tour, Karol released Mañana Será Bonito: Bichota Season, a companion set that highlighted a completely different side of her: tougher, sexier, more experimental. To explain it, she wrote a book about the two versions of herself represented in the two albums and handed it to her tour designer. “I said, ‘This is my story. This is Carolina’s book, and I want her to be a siren.’ And they found the way to put it all into the show.”
While top Latin touring acts have long played stadium dates in Latin America, the notion of a conceptual tour is still relatively rare, and in the United States, only a few Latin artists have done multicity stadium tours. Karol benefited from the expertise of her team, including Assad and Lewis, which had already put together Bad Bunny’s two stadium tours, as well as the rock-solid family foundation that’s an intrinsic part of her business structure. In addition to Acosta, who handles her day-to-day at Habibi, since at least 2019, her sister, Jessica Giraldo, has also functioned as a “360,” overseeing all aspects of Karol’s career, including the growing Bichota Records and its staff; her Medellín office, Girl Power, which runs her merchandise business, among other projects; and her philanthropic Con Cora (“With Heart”) Foundation.
“Strategically, we have a great structure, and there are many, many people focused on massifying Karol’s vision,” says Giraldo, an attorney. “The big change Noah brought when he came on was globalizing the project. He opened the door to big mainstream festivals and big deals, for example. Raymond is his right hand in this project. And I’m the connection between the artist and everything else. I know Karol perfectly well; she’s my sister. But on the professional side, I’ve learned to understand her vision and execute it.”
Balenciaga jacket, Intimissimi underwear, Replika Vintage shoes.
Vijat Mohindra
While families and musical careers don’t always mesh, Karol’s has been an organic part of her structure from the very outset of her journey. Her father, a musician, fostered Karol’s ambitions, managed her until she signed with Universal and was the only person to join her onstage when she won the Latin Grammy for best new artist in 2018. Today, he isn’t part of her actual business, but he is part of her personal support network and, along with her mother, a constant presence at her shows and milestone moments, including this year’s Latin Grammys and Billboard Latin Music Awards, where he sat by her side.
“My family is everything to me,” Karol says. “[Fame] conditions real friendships and real relationships. Having my family — the most real and pure thing — around me makes me feel I’m not living in an ephemeral world where everything is transitory. Having them around me is also my way of thanking them for everything they did for me.”
That backbone will be essential come February, when Karol kicks off her 20-date Latin American stadium tour before an expected European run — all told, a seven-month trek, her longest time on the road yet. As ever, while on tour, she’ll link up with Ovy on the Drums and other writers for sessions to maintain a constant output of singles.
But at this point in her life, she’s ready to handle it all.
“If you ask me what I’m most proud of in the past year, it’s the independence we accomplished,” Assad says. “But I’m very proud of how hard she worked during the pandemic, going from the pandemic to theaters to arenas to stadiums. That all happened from 2020 to 2023, and that’s just amazing.”
Beyond music, Karol will make her acting debut on the Netflix scripted drama series Griselda alongside Sofía Vergara in January. And her Con Cora Foundation for women, launched this year, already has ongoing projects in sports, education and rehabilitation, including a program with the Houston Space Center to send Colombian teens to visit NASA.
“I’m bummed this era will end because definitely it’s the time I reaped what I sowed,” Karol says. “All these years working for something, and finally, that something is working for me. All these things I thought could happen, I trusted they would, and they did.”
When asked what comes next, Karol hesitates for a moment, as if wanting even more would seem too greedy for someone who already has so much.
“I’d love for my music to be heard everywhere, and, truthfully, I’d like my name to be heard all over the world,” she finally says. “Last year, we went to Santorini [Greece], to Kenya, to Dubai [United Arab Emirates], on holiday. And when people asked us where we were from and I said, ‘Colombia,’ the reaction always was, “Oh, Shakira, Shakira.’ ”
And then, in typical, demonstrative Karol G fashion, she holds up her arm to me. “See? I get goose bumps just thinking about it because that must be the ultimate. To have everyone in the world know your name.”
This story will appear in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
After Morgan Wallen wraps his sold-out Nov. 10 concert at Atlanta’s Truist Park with a crowd singalong to his 2019 No. 1 “Whiskey Glasses,” he enthusiastically roams the edge of the stage, crouching down, eager to get close to his ardent fans. As they thrust albums, cowboy boots and cardboard signs into his hands, the 40,000-seat stadium suddenly starts to feel more like a 200-capacity club.
Wallen has come prepared. He pulls out the appropriate black or silver Sharpie from his jeans pocket and yanks off the cap with his teeth, then autographs each item and poses for selfies. Even once the stadium lights have switched on and people have started to head toward the exits, Wallen is still hanging out. Finally, he starts to jog off, but then stops, turns around and runs back to autograph one more sign — the one that reads “You’re our entertainer of the year” — before leaving the stage for good.
The sign is a nod to Wallen’s prowess as an energetic, engaging performer — his Atlanta audience had no clue he was on antibiotics and was so concerned about a possible return of his spring vocal cord issues that he didn’t talk to anyone for hours before the 90-minute show, including postponing this interview. But it was also a reminder that, although he had lost entertainer of the year 48 hours earlier at the Country Music Association (CMA) Awards — and weathered a potentially career-ending scandal in 2021 — he remains tops with his millions of fans.
When time allows, the post-show autograph session is a nightly ritual. “I like looking them in the eyes,” a recovered Wallen says 10 days later over Zoom in his first major interview in two years. He’s dressed head to toe in gray camo, on his “lunch break” from hunting deer on the 1,700-acre farm outside Nashville he bought earlier this year with his booking agent and good friend, Austin Neal. He has scrubbed off his camo face paint: “I didn’t want to look like an idiot in front of you,” he says with a good-natured grin.
“There’s usually a few people every night where I’m just like, ‘God, that is like the happiest person in the world right now,’ and I always pick those,” he says. “I’m almost tearing up thinking about it. It’s just like, man, I mean a lot to this person, I can tell. I try to tell them, ‘Hey, I saw you up there. I saw you tonight.’ ”
Those fans helped make Wallen, 30, the biggest winner at this year’s Billboard Music Awards, which are based on year-end performance metrics on the Billboard charts. The Big Loud/Republic artist won 11 trophies, including top male artist, top Hot 100 artist and top country artist, as well as top Hot 100 song for “Last Night” and top Billboard 200 album for One Thing at a Time — the first time a male artist has captured the latter two in the same year since Usher in 2004. He dominates the country year-end charts, claiming the No. 1 spot on 12 of the genre’s 28 lists, including Hot Country Songs, where “Last Night” succeeds 2022’s year-end chart-topper, Wallen’s “Wasted on You.”
Wallen’s groundbreaking accomplishments transcend country, too. When “Last Night” hit No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in March, it became the first song by a solo male country artist to top the chart since Eddie Rabbitt’s “I Love a Rainy Night” in 1981. Once it reached the summit, “Last Night” spent 16 nonconsecutive weeks there, the most ever for a noncollaboration. (Wallen nixed the idea of releasing remixes to potentially propel the song past the 19-week record held by Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” featuring Billy Ray Cyrus, says Big Loud partner/CEO Seth England, who heads Wallen’s label and co-manages him with K21’s Kathleen Flaherty. “Morgan loves the original version, and he had made it that far on his own music and accord,” he says.)
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When One Thing at a Time debuted at No. 1 in March, its predecessor, 2021’s Dangerous: The Double Album, logged its 110th nonconsecutive week in the Billboard 200’s top 10, second only to the Sound of Music soundtrack and the most by a solo artist since the chart began publishing weekly in 1956. One Thing at a Time has spent 16 nonconsecutive weeks at No. 1 on the Billboard 200, the most for any album since Adele’s 21 in 2011-12. And, after debuting at No. 1, the album logged the next 31 weeks in the top five.
As country music experiences its biggest surge in popularity since the Garth Brooks era three decades ago, Wallen (alongside Luke Combs) is the tip of the spear for the genre’s new generation, which includes Zach Bryan, Lainey Wilson, Jelly Roll, Bailey Zimmerman and Wallen’s frequent writing partner and close friend, HARDY. He has shifted country’s streaming calculus by releasing albums that contain more than 30 tracks and racking up tremendous consumption tallies: One Thing at a Time’s songs earned 498.3 million on-demand streams in its first week, the most ever for a country album, according to Luminate. Through the third quarter of 2023, country music’s on-demand audio and video streaming grew by 24% year over year — and Wallen accounted for 31% of that growth. Of all country music on-demand streams through the same period, 10% belonged to Wallen. For the first time since the 2013 launch of the year-end Streaming Songs Artists chart, a country act (Wallen) leads the list, and a country song (“Last Night”) is No. 1 on the year-end Streaming Songs chart.
He’s catching the eye of legendary country artists, who now study his methods. “This is a new generation that is streaming, which is something new to Dolly,” says Dolly Parton’s manager, Danny Nozell. “What Morgan is doing, I want to take and see how I can apply that to Dolly.” (To wit: Parton released the longest album of her career, the 30-track Rockstar, in November.)
Similarly, Luke Bryan, who calls his good friend Wallen a “world-class songwriter, singer and performer,” was also impressed by Wallen’s new-school methods. “His ability to relate to fans by way of introducing new songs by performing them on socials was truly a brilliant way to build his career,” he says.
“When I started doing this, I had no intentions or expectations of becoming that guy,” Wallen says of being the de facto leader of this new country movement. “But yeah, I’m definitely proud of it. Especially when people say to me that they never liked country music before and now it’s [their] favorite.”
Rye 51 shirt, PAIGE jeans, Tecovas boots.
Daniel Chaney
As massive as Wallen’s following is, in early 2021 and for quite some time afterward, it looked like he could lose it all after a neighbor gave TMZ video footage of him using a racial slur. But Wallen’s fans never abandoned him — in fact, they rallied around him.
Their fervor was, in some ways, a testament to how, in a sea of male country artists who often seem interchangeable, Wallen has always stood out — not only for his instantly recognizable raspy twang, but for the intimate tone of his songs, many of which he co-writes.
“There’s a level of conversation Morgan brings to a song that makes him such a strong writer; you immediately feel invested in the story,” says Miranda Lambert, who co-wrote One Thing at a Time’s “Thought You Should Know” with Wallen and Nicolle Galyon. In February, the song became his eighth No. 1 on the Country Airplay chart; he has already scored two more.
While he leans toward tried-and-true tropes — the cry-in-my-beer midtempo ballad, the playfully cocky you’re-going-to-wish-you-never-left-me tune — he often injects them with a vulnerability that’s the antithesis of last decade’s bro-country movement. And by infusing many of his traditional country melodies with rap cadences and beats and alt-rock guitars, Wallen has expanded his audience far beyond country’s typical listenership.
“I obviously have brought some of my own flavor into the space and everybody doesn’t necessarily like that, and I don’t care because I love it,” says Wallen, whose favorites range from indie-rockers The War on Drugs to country rebel Eric Church to rappers like Moneybagg Yo and the late Young Dolph. “I love being able to incorporate all the types of music that I like. If I had to sing one kind of song for two hours, I’d lose my mind.”
The first stadium show Wallen played was on May 31, 2018, as one of three supporting acts for Bryan at Toronto’s Rogers Centre. It was also the first stadium show he had ever attended. Bryan had heard Wallen’s 2017 hit “Up Down” and felt “it spoke to just the right audience, and I knew then I wanted Morgan on tour with me.”
“I remember going out there and it was like, ‘Gawwwwd!’ It just felt so massive,” Wallen says. Five years later, stadium stages feel like home. “We played in Austin [five days ago] in an arena. There were 12-13,000 people there, and it felt tiny,” he says. “Then we played the stadium in Houston [two days later], and it was like back to normal again.” He laughs as he catches himself, knowing there’s nothing normal about his life these days: “What? That’s not normal.”
Growing up in Sneedville in East Tennessee (2021 population: 1,315) and then outside of Knoxville, Tenn., where his family moved when he was in middle school, Wallen, the son of a public school teacher and a minister (his father is now a semitruck driver), had no money for luxuries like concerts. Any extra cash went to support his baseball career: He was a star pitcher and shortstop in high school before an arm injury his senior year took him off the diamond for good.
“When baseball ended, that was really tough because that’s all he was thinking about,” England says. “I think he probably transformed that into a new drive and [thought], ‘I’m going to have to really work hard at something else.’ ”
Now he’s filling the ballparks he dreamed of playing in as a kid. This year, the One Night at a Time tour played three nights at the Boston Red Sox’s Fenway Park and had double plays at venues including San Diego’s Petco Park and Atlanta’s Truist Park, the respective homes of baseball’s Padres and Braves. Through Nov. 18, the tour had grossed $300.4 million and sold 1.5 million tickets, making it the highest-grossing country tour ever reported to Billboard Boxscore.
“The charisma has always been there, but now [the show] is so tight,” says Neal, head of The Neal Agency and Wallen’s booking agent since 2017. (Neal launched his company in early 2022 following his departure from WME, several months after Wallen left the agency.) Wallen used to talk and fidget much more onstage. “We used to say he’d go on a soliloquy, but now he’s so dialed in. Plus, he can’t talk that much because he’s got so many songs that he’s got to play.”
LTIFONE sweater, Mister Freedom jacket, Nudie jeans.
Daniel Chaney
Still, in April, Wallen’s vocal load caught up with him. Minutes before he was to go onstage for a second sold-out night at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in Oxford, Miss., 45,000 fans learned he had lost his voice and couldn’t perform. After powering through a few more shows several days later, a visibly upset Wallen told his more than 6 million Instagram followers that doctors had ordered him to go on vocal rest for six weeks, resulting in the postponement of multiple shows.
Though Wallen says he isn’t “the type of person that really worries a lot,” the experience scared him, especially after some doctors told him his voice might be permanently altered. He was spooked “100%” by what happened in Oxford, England says. “During that stretch, he was having real trouble with his voice. It was rough.” But unlike in Oxford, when Wallen started having vocal issues the week of his Atlanta shows, he had doctors at Vanderbilt and his vocal coach — who taught him methods to make singing more sustainable and joined him in Atlanta — at his disposal.
The support system that has sprung up around him is a far cry from 2014, when Wallen was working as a landscaper in Knoxville and competed on The Voice. Back then, he could certainly move more freely, without the bodyguards he requires now.
“Everything has gotten so, so huge,” he says. “I don’t really go to the grocery store. I have to go through back doors to go to the doctor and all that kind of stuff. I still try to hold on to as much [normalcy] as possible. I like driving, so I try to drive as much as I can by myself.” Adjusting to fame has been tough at times for Wallen, and he’s not sure that he has. When old friends don’t invite him to events, it sometimes bothers him, even though he knows the disturbance his presence can cause. And he has found a second use for the camo gear. After hunting, he sometimes leaves on his cap, camo top and a little face paint, just enough so that he can “sneak around, just wherever I can go, maybe a Mexican restaurant.” Otherwise, he says, “I play my shows, I hang out with my son, [Indie, 3], and I hide pretty much. And I’m OK with that. I’m happy as hell with that.”
HARDY, who has toured with Wallen off and on since 2018, speaks more bluntly about the limitations fame has placed on his friend. “In the last couple of years, he handles himself so much differently out on the road. He protects himself from situations that might get him in hot water,” he says. “He doesn’t go out to bars. If there’s a good time to be had, we have it backstage where we’re safe and where f–king people aren’t videoing and trying to get a rise out of somebody. We will still have the same amount of fun, but we do it in an environment [without] the public eye on us anymore. It sucks that you can’t really do it that other way, but you just can’t when you get Morgan Wallen famous.”
If Morgan Wallen wasn’t already aware of how famous he was, he found out Feb. 2, 2021, when TMZ published that video of a drunk Wallen (on “hour 72 of a 72-hour bender,” he later said) casually using a racial slur as he told a friend to get another friend home safely. TMZ’s post included an apology from Wallen, but the reaction was swift and severe. Radio playlists pulled his music, his booking agency dropped him, awards shows deemed him ineligible, and his own label suspended him.
It wasn’t the first time Wallen’s behavior had raised flags. He was arrested for public intoxication and disorderly conduct in May 2020 after a disruption at Kid Rock’s Nashville bar, and five months later, Saturday Night Live revoked its invitation to perform after he violated the show’s COVID-19 safety protocols. (The show had him on two months later.) But Wallen says that the experience in 2021 truly showed him “just how much that people listen to me. I don’t think I realized that, at least not at that grand of a scale at the time,” he says, carefully weighing his words. “I [learned] how much my words matter.”
Now, nearly three years later, Wallen says, “That person is definitely not the same person I am now.” He doesn’t diminish the hurt his words caused or question the actions the industry took, but he admits to feeling anger that so few gave him the benefit of the doubt and rushed to brand him a full-blown racist.
“There’s no excuse. I’ve never made an excuse. I never will make an excuse,” Wallen says of using the slur. “I’ve talked to a lot of people, heard stories [about] things that I would have never thought about because I wasn’t the one going through it. And I think, for me, in my heart I was never that guy that people were portraying me to be, so there was a little bit of like, ‘Damn, I’m kind of actually mad about this a little bit because I know I shouldn’t have said this, but I’m really not that guy.’ I put myself in just such a sh-t spot, you know? Like, ‘You really messed up here, guy.’ If I was that guy, then I wouldn’t have cared. I wouldn’t have apologized. I wouldn’t have done any of that if I really was that guy that people were saying about me.”
“Any of that” included meeting with several Black leaders, including 300 Elektra Entertainment chairman/CEO Kevin Liles, Universal Music Group executive vp/chief people and inclusion officer Eric Hutcherson and Grammy-winning gospel artist Bebe Winans, as well as with the Black Music Action Coalition (BMAC) and other groups in an effort to educate himself; his process “to learn and try to be better” continues, he says.
“I think that moment was a cloud with a silver lining because I think it showed him he has a platform that can do good,” HARDY says. “He realized, ‘I’ve got to get my sh-t together.’ ”
One such platform is the Morgan Wallen Foundation (formerly the More Than My Hometown Foundation). By February 2022, Wallen and Big Loud (on behalf of Wallen from his royalties) had donated $500,000 to organizations including The National Museum of African American Music, Rock Against Racism and the BMAC. Three dollars from every concert ticket Wallen sells goes to the foundation, which primarily helps underserved communities through supporting music and sports youth programs, and has donated over $1 million in 2023, including $100,000 to the Atlanta Braves Foundation and $500,000 to Habitat for Humanity of Greater Nashville to help revitalize a baseball and softball complex.
Despite this philanthropic push, don’t expect Wallen to use his sizable platform to speak out on social or political issues. When asked if he plans to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024, he swiftly answers, “No,” before continuing: “That’s not where my head’s at. I’m not an expert. I just don’t know enough to try to guide people. I know what I know, and that’s music.”
Stitched custom shirt, jacket and pants; Tecovas boots.
Daniel Chaney
Following the incident, Wallen says he did a 30-day stint in rehab in San Diego, and he has since drastically changed his drinking habits on the road. “That used to be my warmup — to get half lit: ‘I’m going out there, and we’re going to go have fun.’ Now, that is not the way I approach it,” he says.
Part of the change is just plain logical: playing massive stadium stages, “there’s a lot more ways you can fall than there is on a little one,” he says with a laugh. But his lifestyle changes (and the boost in his confidence level that has resulted) have also completely altered how he approaches performing. “I used to be scared to even think about what it would be like to play a show without drinking: ‘That sounds terrible. Why would I ever do that?’ And now I’m almost scared to wonder what it’d be like if I was drunk.” As far as drinking off tour, “I’m still figuring out my personal life,” he says. “I probably always will be.”
Despite the work he has done to make amends, there are still inroads to be made. While his fans fervently stood by him — sales of Dangerous soared 102% the week after the incident, and he headlined a 55-date arena and amphitheater tour in 2022 — not everyone was ready to move on.
Since the scandal, Wallen’s name is seldom heard when nominations or winners are announced at peer-voted awards shows. In November, he didn’t receive any Grammy nominations (though “Last Night,” which he didn’t write, is up for best country song), and Wallen, who won best new artist at the 2020 CMA Awards, went 0-3 at the CMAs this year. (Dangerous did win album of the year at the 2022 Academy of Country Music Awards.)
England acknowledges that “some people have no intention of forgiveness, but that’s also OK. Morgan realized that he has just got to control what he can control. He’s certainly not getting shut out in these awards because he’s a bad musician.”
Wallen shrugs off the snubs. The CMA losses “bothered me for like five minutes,” he admits. “And then I’m like, ‘Why am I mad? I’m about to go play for 80,000 people in Atlanta.’ ”
Daniel Chaney
And there are other recent victories to celebrate, like sharing the BMI Country Awards’ songwriter of the year honors with Combs on Nov. 7 — meaningful recognition for Wallen, who says he has heard criticism that he doesn’t write enough songs on his albums or relies too much on his co-writers. He has nothing but praise for the writers who contribute to his records but admits with a wry chuckle that the BMI Award was “validating … It’s kind of like maybe I do know a little bit about what I’m doing.”
Wallen has released collaborations with top country names including Eric Church, Chris Stapleton and Florida Georgia Line, as well as with Diplo and rapper Lil Durk. (Their “Broadway Girls” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart in 2022.) But he’s well aware that he hasn’t yet released a game-changing co-ed duet like Jason Aldean and Carrie Underwood’s “If I Didn’t Love You” or HARDY’s murder ballad “wait in the truck” with Lainey Wilson. However, he quickly adds, it’s not for lack of trying.
“I’ve reached out to a couple of people, and they’ve turned me down,” he says, declining to name names. “I just really want certain people, and I haven’t gotten the chance to do it yet. I’m going to keep trying to write songs for it or write with them.”
England says the timing hasn’t worked out, adding that Wallen sent a song for his next album to a noncountry artist as a possibility. “The answer was bittersweet,” he says. “It was, ‘Holy sh-t, this sounds like a global No. 1 record, but I just can’t do it right now.’ ”
Wallen says he “would love” to write with more women, but admits he frequently returns to his very successful “little squad” of collaborators “because I’ve just been slammed, and when I’m not on the road, I’m spending time with my son or hunting. I haven’t really wanted to branch out much just because I needed to keep myself sane.”
One new collaborator eager to work with Wallen: Post Malone. The artist, who is recording a country album, wrote with Wallen, ERNEST and Charlie Handsome, among others, when he was in town to perform with Wallen and HARDY at the CMA Awards. But Wallen confesses that Post Malone’s studio hours were hard for him. “[He] likes to write really, really late at night — and I can’t do that three nights in a row. I can do that one night,” he says with a laugh. “I can start about 5 p.m., but starting at 10 p.m. — that’s rough.”
A little while ago, when HARDY was at Wallen’s house, they headed out to his workshop. “Indie was in the bed. Morgan’s out here looking for an outlet to plug in a baby monitor. I was just like, ‘Man, that’s something I didn’t think I would see five years ago,’ ” HARDY says.
In Atlanta, the tow-headed Indie giggled in delight as he ran through the empty stadium concourse before showtime, pushing a toy dump truck and exuberantly honking the horn on a full-size forklift. “Anything about a vehicle or any part of it, that’s all he cares about,” Wallen later says, grinning broadly.
Wallen and Indie’s mother split before he was born and share joint custody. But Wallen says fatherhood happened for him at the right time. “It gives me something to focus on that’s not just all about myself because for a while, I had to be super selfish. I had to mostly focus on myself or [my career] wouldn’t work,” he says. But now, “it’s nice to really think about someone other than yourself and about what you’re passing down. He’s my favorite thing about life.”
And Wallen’s friends say fatherhood changed him. “Having a son really grew him up fast,” Neal says.
Becoming a dad made him look at life differently, Wallen says, including sparking an interest in expanding into businesses outside of music. In addition to buying real estate, he’s working with Plus Capital to find the right investments, including his recent affiliation as investor and brand ambassador with upstart Ryl Tea, which aligned with his desire to partner with health and wellness brands. “I like having a bunch of different things for me to focus on. [Otherwise], I’ll get bored,” he says. “I have a lot of opportunities, so I’ve been trying to take them.” Will one of those opportunities be, as is a rite of passage of sorts for so many country stars, opening a bar in Nashville? England says only: “It has been discussed. Stay tuned.”
But first, Wallen will spend much of 2024 carrying on with the One Night at a Time tour. In addition to continuing to make up this spring’s postponed dates and a headlining show at the Stagecoach festival, Wallen has added 10 more markets, many with multiple nights at stadiums, including three at Nashville’s Nissan Stadium.
Also potentially ahead: a full-blown international tour, perhaps in 2025. After starting 2023’s tour in Australia, Wallen ended the year with a Dec. 3 show at London’s O2 Arena that sold out in one hour. It was his first time in Europe, and Neal is exploring the best way to proceed globally. Wallen is up for the challenge: “I think it would be fun to go try to win people over again,” he says.
Next year, he’ll also return to the studio. Though more singles are coming from One Thing at a Time, Wallen is already writing and reviewing outside songs for his fourth album. Handsome, who co-produces Wallen’s music with Joey Moi, predicts the next one will be his biggest yet. “I’m expecting to see more songs that can go No. 1 at pop radio because I think people have seen that a country singer with a very Southern voice by himself without a feature can still have a No. 1 Billboard hit,” Handsome says. “Morgan’s leading the way for what country music is now and what it’s becoming.”
When England compares Wallen to another artist, it’s not a fellow young country superstar or a legend of the past, but another especially prolific and versatile performer affiliated with Republic: Drake. “Drake can do a hardcore R&B song, a trap rap song or a Caribbean-tinged beat global pop song,” England says. “I think Morgan is that in our genre. His voice is always going to be country even if he’s singing pop melodies, and the verses are likely to have some country imagery. But when it’s time to sing the big runs and melodies, the guy can do it. Even though he’s got a lot of older fans, he’s certainly got the young kids just wrapped around the sound right now. I don’t think that’s just a short-term thing. I think the guy’s got the ability to do that for decades to come.”
This story will appear in the Dec. 9, 2023, issue of Billboard.
The scene at the Chipotle on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley at first looked much like any other Friday evening. Six good-looking guys in their early 20s sat around a table eating burritos, laughing and ribbing one another. They had landed at LAX that morning after a 16-hour flight, but despite their jet lag, the vibe was lively.
Then an emergency alert lit up one of their cellphones. Seconds later, a warning buzzed on another device. And then another, and another, and another, and yet one more. It was Oct. 6 — already Oct. 7 on the other side of the world in Israel — and the moment things got very real for as1one, the first-ever boy band comprising Israeli and Palestinian musicians.
The guys had arrived in Los Angeles from Tel Aviv, Israel, to lay down tracks for their forthcoming debut album — a trek made following months of visa coordination and more than a year since the group officially formed, after first being conceived in the United States years prior. The team behind as1one, led by longtime music executives Ken Levitan and James Diener, envisioned a Middle Eastern version of BTS, and in the effort to create it, Israeli and Palestinian casting directors had held auditions in major cities and tiny villages throughout Israel in 2021. (Auditions could not be held in the West Bank or Gaza due to logistical challenges.) A thousand young men auditioned; the six who were glued to their phones at the Sherman Oaks Chipotle had made it in.
There’s Sadik Dogosh, a 20-year-old Palestinian Bedouin Muslim from Rahat, Israel, with a piercing gaze and an acting background. Neta Rozenblat, a Jewish Israeli who’s 22 but looks younger, grew up in Tel Aviv, where he studied computer science before getting into singing, which led to a 2021 performance on the Israeli version of The X Factor. Hailing from Haifa, Palestinian Christian Aseel Farah, 22, is the group’s rapper and its self-proclaimed introvert. Twenty-three-year-old Jewish Israeli Nadav Philips grew up near Tel Aviv, idolizes Mariah Carey and used to perform as a wedding singer. Niv Lin, 22, is a Jewish Israeli from a desert town in southern Israel and played professional basketball before shifting to singing. (He also performed on The X Factor.) And Ohad Attia, also 22 and a Jewish Israeli, grew up in Tel Aviv singing and playing the guitar, a skill he flexes beautifully in the group.
On the surface, the six young men check all the usual boy group boxes: They strike the requisite balance between dreamy and adorable and sing ballads and bangers with heart-melting harmonies about girls, love and “dancing like the whole world is watching,” as one of their songs proclaims. But while each knew they were signing up for a boundary-pushing endeavor simply by joining a group composed of Palestinians and Israelis, they couldn’t have predicted that their message of unity would be so intensely tested before they had even released any music.
When the guys went to sleep at their L.A. rental house on the night of Oct. 6, they weren’t yet sure what to make of the alerts. They had all grown up accustomed to intermittent rocket warnings that often passed without incident. But by morning, it was clear what was happening back at home had little precedent: Hamas operatives had killed about 1,200 people throughout southern Israel in coordinated attacks on villages, kibbutzes and at a music festival. (“Niv lives not far from where that rave was, so he undoubtedly would have been there,” Diener says, adding that the woman Lin had just started dating, along with other friends, was killed in the attack.) Their scheduled sightseeing tour of L.A. was canceled. Instead, the guys spent the day frantically calling and texting with friends and family back home.
As news of the Oct. 7 attacks spread, as1one was given the option to fly back to Israel as soon as possible. But after talking among themselves, they decided to stay. “In the beginning, we really felt bad that we couldn’t do anything, that we couldn’t help our families and friends in Israel,” Attia says. “But then when you think about it, you really realize we’re on a mission and that we can be helpful. We can show the world.”
Ohad Attia
Austin Hargrave
The next day, as1one went to its scheduled studio session and met with songwriter-producers Jenna Andrews and Stephen Kirk, who together have credits on mega-hits like BTS’ “Butter” and “Permission To Dance.” Andrews and Kirk had already joined as1one for writing sessions in Israel, and that familiarity helped the duo channel the group’s intense emotions into music as the horrific news from Israel continued.
“The toughest moments were during the sessions,” Rozenblat says. “I was told about two friends that were killed, Niv was told about friends of his that were killed — a lot of us found out about really awful stuff during that session, not to mention that now there’s a whole war going on.”
But by the end of the session, they had a new song. Two-and-a-half weeks later, in a sun-drenched conference room in Century City, they play it for me through a beat-up Bluetooth speaker.
“What if we just stopped the world/Hold the phone/Faced the hurt/Take me home/We’re not built for this/We’re built for more/Forget the score/Show me what it’s like when we stop the world,” the sextet sings over a pulsing beat. It’s the kind of anthem that’s vocally reminiscent of the Backstreet Boys’ heyday and thematically evocative of — depending on how you’re listening — either a tumultuous romance or the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
“How crazy is it to get hugs from Palestinian friends when my Israeli friends died?” Lin says. “That’s our story.”
Sadik Dogosh
Austin Hargrave
As1one wasn’t necessarily intended to function as a singing six-man answer to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Seeing how K-pop and Latin music became global forces over the past few years, Levitan and Diener wanted to form a group from outside the Western world that they could build into a superstar act. They had experience with this caliber of artist: Levitan helped develop Kings of Leon, managed Bon Jovi and, as co-founder and president of Nashville-based Vector Management, has worked with Kesha, The B-52s, The Fray and more. Diener launched A&M Octone Records, where he developed acts including Maroon 5, and after the label sold its 50% share to Interscope Geffen A&M, he co-founded the music publishing and management firm Freesolo Entertainment.
Together they looked to Israel, a place, Diener says, where “we felt that what they have to say musically hadn’t really been given a shot on the world stage.” The pair weren’t seeking to create a group made up of Israelis and Palestinians — only to, as Levitan says, “leave no stone unturned” in their search for the country’s very best talent. They began traveling to Israel in late 2021, first to find the Israeli and Palestinian casting directors and consultants who could get them access to local music schools, conservatories and recording studios where they would scout talent. (They’ve been back to the country every two months since the first trip.) Ami Nir, an A&R executive at Universal Music Group in Israel, became their partner in the project and was crucial in creating connections.
Aseel Farah
Austin Hargrave
Even before meeting any prospective singers, the pair — who refer to themselves as the group’s founders and producers — encountered plenty of challenges: raising investment money, working in a foreign market (and during a global pandemic) and, above all, the historic tensions between Israelis and Palestinians. During one meeting, a potential Palestinian talent scout was so opposed to the idea of a mixed band that she flicked her cigarette ashes at Levitan and Diener.
“We were really working from negative one, not even at zero,” Levitan says of the meeting. “She was very pessimistic.” But as the two explained their history in the business and their vision for the group, the scout uncrossed her arms and listened — and, shortly thereafter, joined the team. Such unlikely changes of heart happened again and again at meetings throughout the country. “I think people felt our sincerity,” Diener says. “They didn’t feel like this was in any way a gimmick or a pretext.”
As Diener explains, assembling a group from this part of the world inherently meant being “confronted by the question of, ‘Are you willing to put together a group that may be mixed?’ ” He and Levitan agreed that they were — but that it would require choosing “the right guys who could handle and appreciate that mix of talent within the band,” Diener says.
As they narrowed down the talent pool during auditions, Levitan and Diener met with families of potential members, selling parents, siblings and extended relatives on the idea, often through translators, and many times while sitting around the family’s kitchen table after a meal.
Nadav Philips
Austin Hargrave
By this point, they had also enlisted a documentary crew to film the process; cameras were put in place after people close to Levitan and Diener suggested what they were doing “might just be historic,” Diener recalls. Ultimately, the local Israeli team was replaced with a crew from Paramount+, which has since shot hundreds of hours of footage for a forthcoming five-episode docuseries produced by James Carroll (Waco: American Apocalypse, Night Stalker: The Hunt for a Serial Killer). “It’s in no way a reality series,” Levitan says. “This is something much more thoughtful and cinematic.”
The cameras were rolling during the final phase of the audition process: a May 2022 boy band boot camp in Neve Shalom, an Israeli village founded in 1969 by Israeli Jews and Arabs to demonstrate that the two groups could live together in peace. Here, the guys played instruments, posed for photo shoots, showed off their dexterity with social media and sang together. “You’d be singing to yourself, then someone standing on the other side of the road would be doing a harmony with you,” Attia recalls.
A psychologist was on site as well, not only to ensure potential members were mentally prepared for the demanding work schedule ahead, but also to weigh in on whether they would fit well within the unique mixed-group dynamic. “There were [guys] we really wanted to work with,” Diener says, “but as their community and parents became more aware of what this was going to look like, they couldn’t endorse it in the same way they’d endorsed the audition process, so we lost a few really good prospects.” (Levitan adds that these prospects wouldn’t have necessarily made it into the group.)
A year-and-a-half after starting the scouting process, Levitan and Diener had settled on the right six guys — it was just by circumstance that four were Jewish Israelis and two Palestinian.
When Levitan and Diener Zoomed Dogosh to tell him he had been accepted, the camera crew caught him jumping around so enthusiastically that his microphone broke. “Getting accepted in the band, it was like a fever dream,” says Rozenblat, who had been tracking 25,000 steps a day while pacing around his house waiting for the news.
Neta Rozenblat
Austin Hargrave
Recording started shortly thereafter, with the guys intermittently traveling from their respective homes to a Tel Aviv studio. Philips and Lin say they had never spoken with a Palestinian person until joining as1one — a name that the guys chose from a few options that the team had come up with and that is pronounced “as one.” Over time, camaraderie grew, and by the time they gave their first live performance at a private event for TikTok Israel eight months after their inception, they were looking, sounding, moving and working the room like a band. (Levitan and Diener often use the words “brotherhood” and “unity” when describing the group’s bond.)
The bonding process ramped up in August, when as1one traveled to London to record at Abbey Road Studios with Nile Rodgers, who plays guitar on one of the songs written by Andrews and Kirk. (The session came together after Diener sent Rodgers the group’s cover of Rodgers’ Daft Punk collaboration, “Get Lucky.”) After they wrapped, Rodgers gave his guitar to as1one guitarist Attia, who says he was “literally shaking” and immediately FaceTimed his mother to tell her. (Overjoyed for her son, she cried.)
On Oct. 5, as1one boarded a flight for what was meant to be a monthlong trip to L.A. The scheduling turned out to be prescient: The team had considered flying the guys out a few days later — which, had it happened, would have put the project on perpetual hold amid a war that to date has killed around 1,200 Israelis (and claimed an estimated 240 hostages) and more than 11,000 Palestinians in Gaza, according to reports from Gaza’s Health Ministry (an agency that, as The New York Times has reported, “is part of the Hamas government in Gaza but employs civil servants who predate Hamas’ control of the territory”).
While their families remain in the increasingly precarious situation abroad, as1one is in L.A. indefinitely, living in a rented house in Sherman Oaks with Andrew Berkowitz (the group’s executive in charge of talent who was involved in casting and has more than 30 years’ experience in artist promotion at labels including RCA and Arista) and traveling to various local studios making music. “Our policy with them is whatever they need, including if they need to go home, we will make that happen,” Diener says. “There’s a lot of people keeping their eyes on them.”
The group has recorded seven songs in the four weeks since its arrival, with collaborators including Andrews, Kirk, Danja (Nelly Furtado’s “Say It Right,” Justin Timberlake’s “SexyBack,” Britney Spears’ “Gimme More”), Justin Tranter (a go-to co-writer for Justin Bieber, Selena Gomez, Maroon 5 and Imagine Dragons) and Y2K (Doja Cat’s “Attention”).
Niv Lin
Austin Hargrave
The songs as1one performs for me live in this conference room include a stirring ballad with lyrics fashioned in boilerplate boy band parlance (“I wouldn’t be me without you!”), rendered in gorgeous six-part harmony and delivered with passion. (They close their eyes a lot while singing.) When the guys launch into a peppier, sexier jam about being hot-blooded animals on the dancefloor, it’s easy enough to imagine a stadium full of fans screaming along. The songs are clever and well-constructed, and the melodies stay in my head long after the meeting is over.
The guys, along with Levitan and Diener, are quick to clarify that they’re less a “boy band” and more a “male pop group,” given that they play instruments (Attia is on acoustic and electric guitar, keyboard and drums; Lin plays keys and acoustic guitar; Philips plays keyboard; Rozenblat plays keyboard and acoustic guitar; Farah is on percussion; and Dogosh is learning piano) and don’t plan on performing choreography. And Levitan and Diener expect that the group’s story will attract a wider-than-usual fan base for an act of this kind. Still, as the duo sees it, their core fan base will likely be — in the high-pitched squealing tradition of groups like *NSYNC and Backstreet Boys — what Levitan calls “a very, very excited and active female audience.”
It’s not yet clear when the first as1one single will be released, and the group hasn’t yet announced a label signing. (Levitan and Diener say they can’t disclose details on label negotiations beyond that “there’s real interest in the band.”) They’re backed by a 30-person team and 15 lawyers representing each member individually and collectively across trademarks, music, film and general counsel, and repped by WME, where they also have film and TV representation. That documentary crew lives with them, still capturing their every move — from jam sessions at the house (where there is a “No harmonicas after 11 p.m.” policy) to the much darker and more complex moments of their recent history.
All this infrastructure is being forged with a singular vision: to make as1one the biggest musical group in the world. “I mean, seriously,” Levitan says. “That’s our goal.”
The stakes for as1one were always high, but they’ve of course become significantly higher over the last six weeks. Eight of the group’s friends and family members have been killed in the conflict. It would be overwhelming for anyone, and certainly must be for the six young men now living 7,500 miles from their home, where a brutal war is being fought. But whether through coaching or genuine belief, the guys present a silver-lining attitude.
“There’s no way to describe how bad you feel,” Philips says. “Your first instinct is to go back and be with your friends and family. Then a few days later, you realize there’s no better service to the world than what we’re doing, and it just gives us a bigger purpose.”
“We don’t want to be political,” adds rapper Farah. “We just want to be humanitarian.”
From left: Sadik Dogosh, Ohad Attia, Niv Lin, Nadav Philips, Aseel Farah and Neta Rozenblat of as1one.
Austin Hargrave
They also don’t want to be inextricably linked to the conflict that, like it or not, has defined their formation. “One of the things we’ve told them,” Levitan says, “especially with everything going on now, [is that these events] can be an influence [on the music] but just can’t be directly related, because [the music] has got to be broad enough where everybody can relate to it.”
Right now, though, the inherent message of an Israeli-Palestinian group named as1one may give the act a greater meaning than Diener and Levitan could have ever imagined, regardless of what the guys are singing about. Conversations now aren’t just about being the biggest band in the world, but about the Nobel Peace Prize.
“You may say it’s a pie-in-the-sky kind of goal,” says Levitan. “But what this has become is that important.”
This story originally appeared in the Nov. 18, 2023, issue of Billboard.
The scene at the Chipotle on Ventura Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley at first looked much like any other Friday evening. Six good-looking guys in their early 20s sat around a table eating burritos, laughing and ribbing one another. They had landed at LAX that morning after a 16-hour flight, but despite their jet […]
Tate McRae was recently scrolling TikTok when an old interview she did at 16 came across the screen. “I was the most awkward person ever, and I was like, ‘There’s no chance that this is the same person,’ ” she says with a grimace. “You evolve so much, and not only am I seeing it, but I’m documenting it in my music in real time.”
Now 20 and living in Los Angeles, the native of Calgary, Alberta (which she calls “the Texas of Canada”), has spent much of her life thus far on screens — both her own, while navigating TikTok like a promotional pro, and others, whether on network TV or YouTube. As a teen, McRae placed third on the 2016 season of So You Think You Can Dance and soon after, in fall 2017, launched the weekly YouTube series Create With Tate, which she used to share new choreography and music covers. She thought she would go on to become a backup dancer, but she felt equally drawn to songwriting, covering her bedroom walls with lyrics, quotes and poems that her mother has since painted over in a shade she describes as “serial killer white.”
Tate McRae will perform at the 2023 Billboard Music Awards on Nov. 19. Watch on BBMAs.watch, @BBMAs and @billboard socials.
One of the first videos she posted was a song that proved she wasn’t destined to be anyone’s backup — and could very much hold pop’s center stage on her own. The lovelorn piano ballad “One Day” (which McRae wrote herself) gained traction online, and by early 2018, she and her parents were flying to New York for label meetings (accompanied by McRae’s dance manager at the time); just a year later, it was announced that she had signed a record deal with RCA and a management deal with Hard 8 Working Group. As her high school graduation in Calgary neared, McRae was splitting her time between midterms and awards shows.
“She was so young then, obviously, but so determined and really in some ways sort of moved like a competitive athlete, which makes a lot of sense, given her dance background,” RCA COO John Fleckenstein says. “But still, even at that age, she was so clear on where she wanted to go and what was important to her.”
And while those in McRae’s inner circle agree she has always wanted to steer her own ship — and has proved more than capable — she says that it took her until now to learn how to sail full speed ahead and in only one direction: her own. When she got her start in the industry, she was straddling two different worlds. “Now a lot of my time revolves around music in some way: thinking about music, playing music, driving and listening to music,” McRae says. “It’s all one world.” But merging the two didn’t happen without some friction.
Vintage Junya Watanabe top, MM6 Maison Margiela jeans.
By 2020, McRae was well positioned for a major year, with a proper team assembled. Then came the pandemic; still, she stuck with the plan, releasing what became her breakout hit, “You Broke Me First,” that April despite being homebound — unable to promote it or fully enjoy its success. Like “One Day,” “You Broke Me First” is a tender, midtempo pop song, and together they contributed to McRae’s early classification as a “sad pop” songwriter, drawing comparisons as Canada’s answer to Billie Eilish. But “You Broke Me First” has a bit more bite than its predecessor. It took off on TikTok within a month, ultimately peaking at No. 17 on the Billboard Hot 100, and performances at the MTV European Music Awards and on Jimmy Kimmel Live! followed — all as McRae prepared to graduate and move to Los Angeles.
McRae recalls spending a month in the city in April 2021, renting a house with her parents to “test it out,” during which they read Donald S. Passman’s industry bible, All You Need To Know About the Music Business. “We read this book together because we were like, ‘What are we walking into right now?’ ” At the end of their stay, McRae got her own apartment and has lived solo since. Though she admits she spends lots of time “inside on my couch,” she has found comfort and community in “a really awesome girl group” and fellow artist friends (like pal Olivia Rodrigo, whose “bad idea right?” video includes a McRae cameo) “because we’re private in our personal lives, but then our innermost, darkest, most intense fears are the things we’re putting on display, which is so weird.”
In the following years, McRae released music at a steady pace, including two EPs (All the Things I Never Said and Too Young To Be Sad) and a string of collaborations with artists such as Troye Sivan and Regard (“You”) and Khalid (“Working”), both of which became Hot 100 hits. Her 2022 debut album, I Used To Think I Could Fly, debuted at No. 13 on the Billboard 200 and yielded two more Hot 100 entries while also supporting her headlining tour of clubs and small theaters. All of which should have been cause for celebration — but what McRae remembers most is feeling lost.
“[That] album was a very big internal battle for me. I was so confused with who I was as a person,” she says. “I remember releasing it when I was still on tour, and it felt so overwhelming. I was just like, ‘Oh, wow. I just released my first album. It’s here, it’s happening. I am now an artist.’ And I think as much as it was a relief, I also was just like, ‘Is this right?’ ”
Ottolinger dress, Brandon Hurtado Sandler ring.
As she put together the album, McRae had felt like she “was working with every producer on the planet” and struggled with her “people-pleasing” tendencies while trying to make everyone involved happy. “It took a lot of time after that to be like, ‘OK, let me not look at any other person for a really long time and just figure out who the f–k I am and what I want to do with my life for real.’ ”
By the end of 2022, McRae knew something had to change. She trusted her gut. “I had to figure out who [in the industry] was actually on my side and who wasn’t … so a lot was shifting behind the scenes.” The biggest shift came when she signed a new management deal with Full Stop’s Tom Skoglund, Jeffrey Azoff and Tommy Bruce (all of whom also manage Harry Styles), along with Sali Kharazi and Ali Saunders.
“I was lost in the whirlwind of it all, and it got to a point where I was like, ‘I don’t feel like I’m being respected as a young woman, and I don’t think I’m being heard in the ways that I want to be,’ ” she says. “What I take a lot of pride in is being a genuine, good person. I’m always going to give out that energy, and if the people who are representing you and on your team aren’t reciprocating that, that’s just not the type of people you want on your side. I was just feeling like I was stuck in a spot I had been in for like, five years, and I was like, ‘I feel like I’m going crazy.’ ”
At such a time, she was thankful for her young artist and producer friends, whom she says were “so transparent with me on how things [looked] from the outside.” And now, she couldn’t be more grateful for her new management team and the relationship they’ve built — and the many successes they have already shared. “They look at me and they don’t question me making decisions,” she says. “I want to be a businesswoman. I’m 20 now and I’m still young, but I know what I want.”
Tate McRae photographed on October 31, 2023 in Los Angeles. Masha Popova top, Givenchy skirt, pants and shoes.
Simultaneously, McRae’s creative process shifted as she finally found a consistent co-writing crew in Ryan Tedder, Amy Allen and Jasper Harris. She says the way they made her forthcoming second album, Think Later (out Dec. 8 on RCA), was how she always imagined her idols made albums, with a sense of togetherness. “My last album wasn’t like that at all … I was getting songs from 10 different people and being like, ‘OK, here’s an album.’ And this time it was written by the same core group of people,” she says. “That’s what made the process so fun for me, because it actually felt like a project that I was working on.”
Already, the new process is yielding results. Sultry lead single “Greedy” has become McRae’s highest-charting hit to date, peaking at No. 11 on the Hot 100, driven by 104.2 million on-demand streams, according to Luminate, and its usage in 1.3 million TikTok videos. But arguably, its biggest accomplishment has been reintroducing McRae to the masses — as an artist who, this time, knows exactly who she is.
While McRae says fans shouldn’t expect the entire album to sound like “Greedy,” she thinks the song represents a stylistic through line of “straight pop. It’s also pretty savage.” She credits the shift to her alter ego, Tatiana, McRae’s tour persona whom she describes as “ballsy, so loud and obnoxious.”
Vassia Kostara suit, Givenchy shoes.
In the studio, “I was like, ‘I don’t really give a f–k. I just want to say what I want to say and I want to be 20 years old,’ ” she says. “Sometimes you just want to go out and have a good time and just live life and be present and follow your intuition and not think too hard about it — and I just didn’t feel like thinking too hard about a lot of these songs. I don’t think people are going to expect me to say the stuff that I’m saying.”
In other words, as Fleckenstein puts it: “Some of these records, you’re going to stop in your tracks and go, ‘I didn’t realize she could do that.’ ”
When we talk in early November, McRae tells me her last few weeks have felt like “a bit of a dream.” “Greedy” blasted off; she announced her second album along with a world tour, during which she’ll play her first hometown show and end at Madison Square Garden; and she started prepping for her Saturday Night Live musical guest debut. But, perhaps most impressively, she got her collaborator Tedder to work on a Sunday.
“She’s the first artist to get me to [do that] in close to 10 years!” exclaims Tedder, who executive-produced Think Later. “I don’t care how much I love you, who you are, how many Grammys or how high the stakes are, I don’t work on weekends. Weekends and late-night rap sessions are two things I’ve officially graduated from. But she got me to do it because the song was that good.”
Ottolinger dress, Cult Gaia shoes.
The song came together in one weekend — and after she had technically finished her album. The two had started working at 10 a.m., going through sequences and punching vocals, with the goal of wrapping by 7 p.m. About an hour in, McRae revealed she felt that one box had yet to be checked, sonically speaking, on the album. “We had already sent the tracklist to the label, and at 6 p.m., we walked out with a song completely written, recorded, vocaled and produced,” Tedder says. “It’s the fastest, craziest Hail Mary of my entire life.” The next day, a Sunday, they listened with what he calls “tomorrow ears” and finished the track with enough time for it to make it on Think Later.
McRae and Tedder first met over a Zoom session in 2020, after being connected by mutual friend and songwriter-producer J Kash. As they both recently recalled to each other, they wrote a “trash” song that day and didn’t work together again until late last year, on Tiësto’s thumping dance-pop track “10:35” (on which McRae features). It was clear to Tedder then that McRae had “started to definitively put up guideposts.”
That became even more apparent during their first session together late last year for Think Later, when they wrote one of Tedder’s favorite songs on the album. “That session started with her walking in, opening up a playlist that she made that had 21 to 22 songs on it, and [saying], ‘These are the songs that shaped [me]. I want to figure out the through line and attempt to beat some of these,’ ” he recalls. “She had words and phrases and endless amounts of topics and real-life stories to write from, and that just doesn’t happen. I can count on one hand the artists I’ve worked with in 20 years that have pulled that on day one. And it was the most refreshing thing in the world. Otherwise, you’re playing pin the tail on the donkey in the dark.” (As further proof, he adds that McRae’s mix notes are so detailed “you’d think Quincy Jones wrote them.”)
That session led to many more with the same tight-knit team — just how McRae had always envisioned making an album — including the one for “Greedy.” Earlier this year, Tedder had posted on Instagram a few early-2000s songs he was revisiting, including some by Nelly Furtado, to which McRae replied that she had been listening to the same material. “There was a discussion like, ‘Would it work now?’ ” Tedder says. “I said, ‘One hundred percent it will.’ I’m just old enough where I know cycles, and this cycle is going to happen.”
Vassia Kostara suit, Givenchy shoes.
McRae calls “Greedy” a “wild pass” on which they tried a totally new sound and beat — and just as Tedder predicted, it worked big time. She remembers debuting the single during her Philadelphia tour stop: “No one knew it was coming, and I remember feeling it that first night, like, ‘Holy sh-t, what’s going to happen with this song?’ ”
And while fans may not have known when to expect the song, they knew something was coming thanks to McRae’s TikTok, where she boasts 5.5 million followers (the most of her social media accounts) and had been teasing the song in a series of clips. (Within days of finishing her last song created with Tedder, she had already started teasing that on the app, too.)
“She is not scared or shy about playing music for fans and talking about what she’s doing, and she is driving that conversation every step of the way,” Fleckenstein says. “It’s not a record label ta-da! that you’re seeing around her where there’s some orchestrated marketing promotional shtick. This is about her making something, delivering it to her fans and saying, ‘This is what I care about, and I hope you do, too.’ And then we, as her partners and label, are making it as big as we can possibly make it.”
Tedder says he always tells McRae that, when it comes to social media savvy, “you’re the female [Lil] Nas [X] and he’s the male Tate,” adding that, “Understanding that the world lives on the internet and understanding what people want to hear, how they want to hear it and how they want it to be presented, that is its own art form now that I didn’t have to contend with when I started. I played a gig last night and was with Kygo and The Chainsmokers, and [The Chainsmokers’] Alex [Pall] and Drew [Taggart] cornered me to talk about Tate, and Drew said, ‘Man, I’ve been watching what’s going on with that song. She gets the internet.’ ”
Which is why McRae was well aware that the “Greedy” music video — in which she heats up an ice rink with her impressive dance moves, which she worked on with choreographer-to-the-stars Sean Bankhead — would land so well. “I’m really particular with my taste, and that hasn’t always translated through what the internet has seen of me, even with what I’m wearing and how I’m performing and the choreography,” she says. “I’m so proud of [the “Greedy” video] because I got to actually be a dancer and make a video that I was like, ‘This is sick. I want to show my friends.’ I never ever used to feel that way.”
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Now she’s thinking of how to translate this previously untapped swagger to the stage. On her most recent tour, which wrapped in October, McRae wanted to push herself as a vocalist rather than relying on her dance background to carry the show. And yet, those roots are what so many in McRae’s inner circle call her “magic.” As Tedder says, “She can outdance any pop star and it’s something she rarely flexes — and she flexed in [the “Greedy”] video.”
“The truth is, she is winning because she is singular,” Fleckenstein adds. “And particularly in a pop landscape — which is often a fickle and very difficult place to be successful — you need to be that good.”
And no one understands that better than McRae herself. When she names the artists she most admires, they’re a reflection of her own ambition — and many are former dancers who translated that foundation into global pop superstardom. “When I look at my favorite icons or videos or performances, it’s always the biggest pop stars, so I think that’s always a goal,” she says. “I think what defines a pop star is how iconic [they are]: Madonna, Britney [Spears], Christina [Aguilera]; they would put on these shows and blow everybody away and make timeless art. And that’s what I want to do: make timeless art and timeless performances — and strive to keep on doing that.”
This story will appear in the Nov. 18, 2023, issue of Billboard.
Earlier this year — on a warm day in May, Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month — a septet of young women fought nerves backstage at Forest Hills Stadium in Queens. Just over a year after its official debut, the group XG was in town for Head in the Clouds, a music festival celebrating Asian and Pacific Islander culture, creativity and art organized by record label 88rising. But the gig held broader significance: It was the act’s first international performance outside of Japan, and in New York, no less.
Despite its early-afternoon billing, the stadium was packed — and chanting, “XG! XG! XG!” — when the group took the stage in glitter-emblazoned suits. The warm welcome made it difficult to believe that this was XG’s first time in New York, and after kicking off the set with its debut track, “Tippy Toes,” the crowd’s chants reached a fever pitch as the members segued into their viral hit, “Left Right.” Fans and casual festivalgoers alike danced freely to the beat, some even singing along to the song’s catchy chorus.
Reflecting today on that Head in the Clouds performance and XG’s subsequent appearance at the festival’s Los Angeles iteration, the group — whose members range in age from 17 to 21 — exudes gratitude. “New York was our first international performance, and the ‘XG! XG!’ chants were really touching,” XG’s Cocona says. In Los Angeles, she says, she even saw some fans wearing makeup inspired by the music video for “GRL GVNG,” XG’s prerelease single from its debut mini-album, NEW DNA. “And it was just really, really cool to see all of that!”
XG will headline Billboard the Stage at South by Southwest Sydney at the Hordern Pavilion on Oct. 20. Click here for more information.
Just six months prior, in November 2022, a set of cypher clips — or, in XG’s parlance, a “Galz Xypher” — had gone viral on social media. Taking turns, XG’s Cocona, Maya, Harvey and Jurin delivered crisp solo bars — effortlessly weaving among English, Japanese and Korean — over the instrumentals for J.I.D’s “Surround Sound”; Dreamville’s “Down Bad”; Ty Dolla $ign, Jack Harlow and 24kGoldn’s “I WON”; and Rosalía’s “SAOKO,” respectively. These pieces of content marked a turning point for XG, as new listeners outside of its core K-pop-adjacent fan base began to tune in. At press time, the cypher clips had amassed over 26 million YouTube views and over 16 million TikTok views.
Those four rappers, along with vocalists Juria, Chisa and Hinata, make up XG (short for Xtraordinary Girls). Though trained in K-pop’s sensibilities and practices, XG’s members are all Japanese, and their music, amalgamating R&B, hip-hop and dance, is sung entirely in English. The group is the first act on the label XGALX (its name plays on the XX chromosome pairing denoting female), a project of Tokyo-based entertainment conglomerate Avex, which has previously produced K-pop acts like BoA, TVXQ and BIGBANG. As Avex’s CEO, Katsumi Kuroiwa, told Billboard Japan in September, it launched XGALX in 2017 “with the aim of creating global hits” — and it hoped XG would be the “breakthrough artist” leading a long-term effort toward helping Japanese acts “thrive in the mainstream music world.” The septet was selected in 2017 out of 13,000 candidates, and it trained for five years before making its March 2022 debut.
On their first track, “Tippy Toes,” the girls declared, “Understand that we didn’t come to play.” In less than two years, XG has lived up to that claim, amassing over 637 million views on its YouTube channel; launching an official fan club, ALPHAZ; performing at the Singapore Formula 1 Grand Prix following the aforementioned festivals; and releasing NEW DNA in September.
Chisa
Ssam Kim
Cocona
Ssam Kim
At first glance, XG has the hallmarks of a K-pop group: It was trained under the tenets of that genre’s system while also learning the language, its music videos are highly stylized and made with K-pop production teams, it has performed on Korean music programs like Mnet’s M Countdown, and its creative team includes artist-producers like Chancellor (who has featured on tracks by veteran Korean artists Epik High, BoA and Younha and has written for K-pop artist Kang Daniel). Yet XG classifies its music in an entirely new category that it says transcends current paradigms: X-pop.
“The letter ‘X’ is often used to show something special or unknown,” Jurin explains. And it’s true that XG challenges standards both lyrically and visually. For instance, on NEW DNA’s lead single, “Puppet Show,” the group takes on outdated gender norms, singing, “Imagine a world where we could play different roles, where girls be taking control.” The song’s video matches its message: In an icy, dystopian landscape, faceless, uniformed figures surround XG until the members take literal leaps of faith to dance and sing the chorus on a stage in the center of this alternate universe. Even the album title, NEW DNA, refers to how the members view themselves as a “new species free from all conventions and limitations,” as the group says on its website.
XG’s executive producer, Park “Simon” Junho (also known by his producer moniker, JAKOPS), has been with XG since its earliest stages — down to its selection process and training, as detailed in the group’s ongoing docuseries, Xtra Xtra, uploaded to its YouTube channel. As the Seattle-born son of a Japanese mother and Korean father, Simon grew up absorbing both of those cultures, and he later moved to Korea to train and debut as a K-pop artist. (He was a member of the group DMTN, which was active from 2009 to 2013.)
For XG’s training — which, he says, “was conducted in an unprecedented manner” — Simon fused his own background and artistic style with “the foundation of the Korean [music] that is proven through global success.” Together with XG’s producers, he worked to ensure no two songs on the six-track NEW DNA have the same genre classification. X-pop is the result.
“XG’s ambition is to show music and performances that are not limited to the musical characteristics of a certain country, but can be enjoyed by people from all over the world,” Simon says. (The group has 625 million on-demand official global streams, according to Luminate.) “Current K-pop celebrities are also making ceaseless efforts to transcend the initial ‘K,’ and as a result, they are gradually breaking down boundaries. This is why I call [XG’s music] ‘X-pop,’ in the sense that XG also wants to break down boundaries together and deliver a message that everyone can relate to through music.”
Harvey
Ssam Kim
Hinata
Ssam Kim
To build as global an audience as possible, XG’s team approached making music in ways that diverge from K-pop acts’ traditional methods. Many groups based in Asia start out performing music in their native language with the goal of first building a local fan base, only releasing English-language music later as part of an effort to expand globally. But XG has only released music in English, despite it not being the members’ first language. Even as they converse among themselves in our Zoom interview, they naturally speak to one another in Japanese. And as of September, Avex’s Kuroiwa said that roughly 30% of XG’s listeners were Japanese, with 20% in the United States and 50% in other countries — what he called “an ideal distribution.”
It’s a manifestation of an ongoing K-pop debate: Is the genre defined by its language or by its sensibilities and cultural resonance? What constitutes K-pop — singing in Korean or embodying the elements pioneered by the Korean music business while respecting the genre’s cultural origins? Does language choice matter, or is it simply a tool to expand and reach more fans as a greater cultural movement evolves?
Simon says that XG’s team is intentionally fusing multiple influences — while still honoring their origins. He says that XG and its producers “want to add new color and continue to play the role of unfolding a new world” while still “respecting the legacy of various senior musicians.” In an effort to write lyrics that use expressions “actually used in America,” he notes that the group collaborated with American lyricists and composers, even as it also paired with Korean photographer-director Cho Gi-Seok and Rigend Film to “create innovative visuals” — all part of its intent to “present a novel group that had never been seen before in K-pop, with new sounds, new member compositions and even new visuals.”
From left: Harvey, Juria, Hinata, Jurin, Chisa, Cocona, Maya of XG.
Ssam Kim
Such cross-continental musical collaborations are becoming increasingly common as music globalizes, making previously unthinkable partnerships possible. With X-pop, XG’s team has coined a phrase that reflects this rapidly rising transference of cultures among markets. Yet XG’s collaborations feel unique: not simply partnering for collaboration’s sake, but genuine and organic, drawing on the multicultural experiences of the executive helping to shape the act’s direction.
Simon points out that creating new things in any preexisting environment has its challenges. The notion of “newness” is, to him, not only about working with “talented people with diverse backgrounds, but also with new artists with unique and fresh ideas. ‘Newness’ often raises concerns simply because it is unfamiliar: ‘Will it fit us well? Will our fans like it?’ ” Yet he and XG’s team remain committed to exploring new directions as the group forges ahead. References to evolution are ever present in its visuals, whether in imagery resembling splitting cells or nods to the “X-GENE,” the title of one mini-album track.
When asked about what inspires this kind of creative output, XG shows deep curiosity about the spaces it physically occupies. “Inspiration can come from anything, however small,” Cocona says. “We really try to feel the present. There’s a lot that you can receive if you just have the right antenna pointing in the right direction.
“XG has this motto or slogan, ‘Enjoy the moment,’ and we try to cherish every single moment that we’re alive because there’s a lot of deeper meaning in everything that surrounds you,” she continues. “So I have this photograph folder and anything that gives me inspiration, I’ll save for later. I’ll open up my memo pad and write down words that come to me.” Recently, she recalls being particularly inspired by the Studio Ghibli animated film How Do You Live? (soon to be released in the United States as The Boy and the Heron).
“I watched it once with my family and then again about three days later with the girls and Simon-san. Each time I watched it, different scenes and lines really resonated with me.”
Juria
Ssam Kim
Jurin
Ssam Kim
But ultimately, the members of XG are most inspired by one another and their shared dream. During our conversation, they encourage one another to take the mic, and that’s mirrored in how they approach their work. In fact, before they take the stage or ahead of important events, they shout the word hesonoo, which means “umbilical cord” in Japanese. According to Simon, they see themselves as seven members who share “united hearts and faith, as if they were connected by an umbilical cord.”
“What makes us extraordinary,” Jurin says, “is that I feel we are able to break free from all these norms and borders that tend to bind us. By that same token, there is a bond between us that transcends a lot of types of challenges, and it’s really amazing to have that.”
Cocona agrees. “Everyone is so genuine, it feels like we’re just being our true ‘animal’ selves,” she says. “We live life as it comes and follow our hearts. The moments where we have relaxed conversations with everyone and Simon are when I’m happiest. We always say, ‘Let’s definitely go to [outer] space someday!’ ” (Her groupmates nod agreeably to that ambition.) Harvey adds, “Everyone is just bursting with passion, and our love for each other is so strong! We make sure we communicate well and respect and understand each other, so this forms a really tight bond.”
As Hinata notes, they are motivated by their potential to “give people the courage to move forward,” crediting their ALPHAZ fan base as their main source of energy. “If I had to create a metaphor with this entire ecosystem as a body, [the ALPHAZ would] really be the heart, almost pumping oxygen throughout our whole body,” Jurin says. “The relationship between ALPHAZ and XG is really like family, like we’re coexisting, and whenever we decide that we want to take on some kind of new challenge, [they will be] the first ones to support us and back us up. They really understand us on a different level.”
Maya
Ssam Kim
From left: Harvey, Hinata, Juria, Jurin, Chisa, Cocona and Maya of XG photographed August 9, 2023 in Los Angeles.
Ssam Kim
A few days after NEW DNA arrives, the members reconnect to share early thoughts and reactions to its release. Two physical versions — an “X” version and a “G” version — came out with the same six tracks, a 78-page photo book, stickers and photo cards. “Our ALPHAZ got their hands on [the album] before we did. They said it wasn’t a ‘mini-album’ but a ‘mega-album,’ ” Chisa says with a laugh. “And when I actually held the album, I felt its weight and thought, ‘Yeah it’s not mini, it’s mega.’ ” Both Chisa and Juria say they’ve noticed fans engaging creatively with the photo cards, personalizing and decorating them with stickers, sharing them with one another online.
Though NEW DNA only has six tracks, XG captures a different theme in each of their music videos. In “GRL GVNG” (pronounced “girl gang”), the act performs in dark, moto-inspired clothing in a futuristic setting, whereas in “New Dance,” it wears bright, colorful clothing and dances against everyday scenery like a bowling alley, city alleyways and the beach. “It was so exciting to show a powerful version of ourselves, like in ‘GRL GVNG,’ and then switch to a new persona as in ‘New Dance,’ ” Juria says.
And with the album out and performances in New York, Los Angeles and Singapore under its belt, XG is preparing for yet another momentous event: an upcoming headlining performance at South by Southwest in Sydney. There, Jurin promises, fans can expect to find an even further evolved, “brand-new XG.”
“I don’t want to spoil anything,” Maya adds, “but my members and I are all thinking of something new and exciting for all of you. All I can say is that we want you all to look forward to what we’re preparing and hope you all are ready to have fun with us.”
Billboard’s parent company PMC is the largest shareholder of SXSW and its brands are official media partners of SXSW.
This story will appear in the Oct. 21, 2023, issue of Billboard.