Rejjie Snow

By most metrics, Rejjie Snow appears to be a rap artist and that's technically true.

But he doesn't see it that way, and in any case the simplicity of the label (or any label, really) obscures what makes him different, which is pretty much everything. He lives wherever his suitcase settles, wherever the songs send him — Los Angeles, New York, London — making albums in the middle of making other albums, and tangling words into beautifully complex knots that blur biography with fantasy over a shifting mass of rainy loops, technicolor keys, and trippy percussion. And then there's his voice, deep and otherworldly, capable of riding a beat with metronomic precision, cooing to raw piano, or yawping Prince-like over a soul-rock-jazz groove. His influences are as disparate as George Michael and Charles Bukowski.

Rejjie's debut album was released by BMG. It's executive produced by Rahki, who won a Grammy with Kendrick Lamar, and it's already given us a handful of impressively (though not unexpectedly) diverse gifts. There's the moody G-funk of 'Crooked Cops,' which Rejjie wrote after watching police violence explode in the U.S., and the thrilling 'Flexin',' a hypermodern trap-addled bleak-banger full of unapologetic braggadocio. The chiming 'D.R.U.G.S.' already surpassed 4 million YouTube streams and its followup, 'Pink Beetle,' was named "Hottest Record in the World" by BBC Radio 1's Annie Mac. And this time, rather than retreat amidst growing anticipation, Rejjie went ahead and dropped a full-length mixtape on the way to releasing his LP: 2017's The Moon & You, an experimental beast of a different stripe that, despite a Joey Bada$$ cameo, puts him more squarely in the camp of genre-less auteurs like Shabazz Palaces, Anderson .Paak, and Thundercat. The next opportunity is appropriately astral — a brand new single called 'Virgo' which is already shaping up to be Rejjie’s biggest song yet as the recipient of Track of the Week accolades by three BBC Radio 1 DJs in Annie Mac, Clara Amfo and Adele Roberts. By those metrics, Rejjie Snow appears to be a rap artist on his way to the top.