Pitchfork writer Alphonse Pierre’s rap column covers songs, mixtapes, albums, Instagram freestyles, memes, weird tweets, fashion trends—and anything else that catches his attention.
By the time you’re done reading this, Virginia rapper-producer GAWD will probably have another song out
Keeping up with GAWD’s musical output is a full-time gig. Over the past decade, he’s logged more than 1,500 SoundCloud uploads—mostly self-produced rap tracks, along with beats for sale and DJ mixes—across nearly 50 different aliases including TRICK RACER, MR I GOT GASS N I CNT PASS, and, simply, YEAH. There’s probably even more material I’m missing. There have been GAWD songs that I heard once and was never able to find again, leaving me to wonder if they were hallucinations. Searching for something specific in his scattered catalog can feel as pointless as trying to find a woman in the crowd of a Conway the Machine show.
The songs themselves don’t do that much to alleviate that feeling of being lost on the dark side of Mars. Across countless blurry concept albums (including ones about spiritual awakenings and political conspiracies) and freewheeling mixtapes, he offers a disorienting marathon of pitch-altered, inner-monologue-style rapping, blown-out and synth-heavy psychedelic beats, and a barrage of DJ tags. The enigmatic 24-year-old’s music comes off as random and improvised but, in the grand tradition of mind-meltingly prolific rappers like Lil B, there is intentionality to the chaos.
Speaking from his home in Richmond, Virginia, GAWD talks about hip-hop with the passion and curiosity of a daily rap forum poster. “50 Cent was the first rapper I perceived,” he says. “Bruh was deadass a New York rapper with West Coast G-funk melodies.” (One of his most-used aliases is 65 Cent.) He goes on to explain the curatorial importance of once-mighty mixtape DJs like Evil Empire and DJ Drama, whose skills have become less appreciated in the streaming era. “DJs are the ones who could represent an entire region or style,” he stresses, before citing DJ Victoriouz and DJ Moondawg’s unforgettable work with Chief Keef. “I know how I felt when Back From the Dead dropped.”
GAWD hasn’t had a proper breakout moment quite yet, but there was 2019’s “EVERYWHEREIGO,” which he produced for Richmond native BabyxSosa and now has over 4 million plays on YouTube. You can usually count on him to put out a complete project every few weeks, so when four whole months passed between June’s 30-song spiritual odyssey 65 DEGREES FAHRENHEIT and this week’s 10/17 (which, of course, literally appeared out of thin air as I was writing this) the break felt as long as the one Dr. Dre took between 2001 and Compton.
Both projects feature dizzying blends of fun, off-the-cuff shit (“Blunt as long as my discography,” he raps on “65 DEGREES THEME”), what sounds like confessional voice memos thrown over a beat (“The memories sometimes they can get to me/They sit with me, thoughts crawl around like millipedes,” he raps on “THOUGHTS SIT W/ ME”), and completely random musings (three straight bars of dissing egg salad, potato salad, and chicken salad on “Y & R”). “It’s a very spiritual process,” GAWD says. “Randomly I’ll have a prophetic vision and sometimes an entire scene comes to me. I can be taking a shower or getting dressed and a bar will just come.”
As a producer, though, GAWD has been particularly productive as of late. Earlier this month he released Been Bout It, a must-hear collaborative project with D.C.’s WiFiGawd on the mic (it’s their third tape as duo and second of this year). Riding an endless stream of thumping 808s, GAWD’s beats could split your ear drums. (In conversation he casually brings up landmark hard-hitting tapes like Gucci’s The Burrprint and Waka Flocka’s Salute Me or Shoot Me series.) Underneath the stuttering thrashes is a wide array of lush chords, trance-like synths, and computerized noises that call to mind everything from the helter skelter bounce of Timbaland to the silly mayhem of mid-2010s collectives like Goth Money Records and Metro Zu to the trunk rattling funk of late-’90s Memphis and New Orleans.
Three days later came New York luminary MIKE’s triumphant heat check Burning Desire; on an album with no shortage of brain-rewiring beats, GAWD might have the most bugged-out one with “African Sex Freak Fantasy.” It doesn’t sound quite like any other GAWD beat I’ve heard before, with warped, crashing drums that hit like a Death Star explosion. In a way it feels out-there enough to have been on EL-P’s 2002 indie-rap classic Fantastic Damage—though GAWD was actually inspired by drum’n’bass and Donkey Kong. “That was just from my backlog of beats,” he says casually. “I got years of sounds, some are made in 2018 but are for 2025.”
No matter the project, GAWD is often on a wavelength that’s unreachable unless you are stoned out of your mind. You just gotta buy in and get lost in the fog. In fact, that’s what GAWD does himself. “When I perform I don’t even remember my lyrics sometimes,” he admits. “I end up rapping lines that I didn’t even end up recording, or words coming from I don’t know where.” He can’t keep up either.
A predictably anti-social Veeze performance in NYC
In New York these days, you’re more likely to see people lining up outside of a viral bagel shop than at a regional rap show. But last week I joined a queue of loyalists, including a few content creators filming man-on-the-street TikToks, on the sidewalk near Manhattan’s Gramercy Theatre waiting to see Veeze. It was the first stop of the Detroit rapper’s new tour in support of Ganger, one of the year’s best rap records.
When Veeze hit the stage, he didn’t say a word to the crowd. With his ear-flap beanie bouncing around, he quickly powered through 90-second snippets of a catalog that is deeper than you would think for a guy with only two projects that are four years apart. Somehow, seemingly everyone knew the words to everything—impressive given how it requires careful listening to pick up on the blitz of slurred rhymes in his songs.
Eventually, Veeze was hardly even rapping any of the words himself; it was more aux-cord singalong than performance. The crowd didn’t seem to mind. Every now and then, in between internet smashes such as “Law N Order” and “Meg Thee Stallion,” he mumbled a few words to the audience. As he did joints off Ganger, I noticed that people lost their shit at specific punchlines rather than at the start of songs—which makes sense because one Veeze bar can make an entire song. (I sometimes play “Tramp Stamp” just for the part where he goes, “I’m the first nigga from my hood with jet lag.”) As the night came to an end, I rapped along in my bubble until Veeze left the stage as quietly as he arrived.
Firebatch: “Cuban Link”
Firebatch are mobbed out for real. Almost every other song on the Milwaukee crew’s mixtape Firebatch vs. the State has enough rappers to fill a Family Feud team. They pass the mic around so fast that, at first, when I was mostly listening to the group through random SoundCloud leaks, I thought they were one, maybe two, dudes. But no. On “Cuban Link” there are four: Firebatch Parti, Firebatch Twonymoe, Firebatch Gball, and Firebatch Flame. (Missing on this track are Firebatch Teka, Firebatch Dooda, and the member with the best name, Firebatch Sam.) They waste no time getting to their stories of drug dealing and brotherly love. The beat is brisk, and the raps are low-stakes, as if they’re just fooling around until it’s time to get back to the grind.
Anycia and Karrahbooo: “Splash Brothers”
Anycia and Karrahbooo go into Rio and Mike mode on “Splash Brothers,” nodding to the Flint, Michigan duo in their accelerating back and forths. Anycia lulls you in with her husky, nonchalant voice, before Karrahbooo ups the energy with a string of trash-talking punchlines: “Yo’ nigga a bum, get ’round the guys and beg to hit the cup.” Both are funny in different ways: Anycia is so casually disrespectful, while Karrahbooo is more animated. By the time they’re going couplet for couplet, the jarring vocal shifts only make the experience that much more bonkers.
Lil Tony: “Canoozled”
I’ll admit it, the opening line of this new single from Atlanta rapper Lil Tony makes absolutely no sense to me: “Is you tryna’ fuck, ho?/I’m canoozled.” Maybe he was actually going for “canoodle”? The music video adds more context: A girl is knocking on his door while he’s cuddled up with another woman in bed. So, I guess that’s it? Confusion aside, it sounds hard as hell when he raps the bar. That’s not unusual for Lil Tony. On his May mixtape TKEY, there are hardly any individual lyrics that I would consider to be that thought-out, but his mean mumbles and eerie ATL beats give his music a distinct mood. “Canoozled” has that going for it as well. The instrumental is so quiet it’s nearly ambient, as he rattles off threats and basketball references in a cadence that’s not far off from early 21 Savage. Making up words is fine when you sound this cool.
