B
rooklyn restaurant Underhill Cafe is scarcely occupied on a rainy Thursday afternoon. The rustic cafe’s solitary television is airing basketball from the Eurobasket league, and the lone waiter periodically bounces between watching the game and serving the restaurant’s three patrons. I sit alone at a four-person table until redveil arrives unassumingly, hopping out of an Uber.
He’s in New York City for a couple more days, conducting listening sessions for his upcoming Sankofa album, dropping Dec. 4. He’s also handling other business, including a stop by the Little Simz show later that evening. It’s clear that he’s getting everything arranged for what might be his biggest year yet as an artist. “I feel like it’s going to be a crazy 2026,” he says. “It’s a little nerve-racking being quiet about the stuff I’m working on and hoping that people are going to be fully receptive once everything is done and out.”
The PG County-born, LA-based rapper-producer was born to a Canadian-Jamaican mother and a father from New Orleans by way of the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts. He split time between both of their homes in PG, being influenced by their disparate music tastes, time in church (which taught him poignancy and how to layer sounds) as well as his growing love for hip-hop through artists like J. Cole, Tyler, the Creator, and Logic, who were his first inspirations when he dropped his first project, 2019’s Bittersweet Cry at 15.
It was 2020’s niagara and 2022’s Learn 2 Swim that rapidly established his earnestness, lyrical prowess, and knack for immersive production on songs like “pg baby,” “Soulfood,” and “Weight.” His catalog got the attention of figures like Brooklyn-based rapper MIKE, comedian, rapper and DJ Zach Fox, and Tyler, the Creator, who shared all his music. His music isn’t overly political, but he showed his empathy in a viral 2023 moment at Tyler’s Camp Flog Gnaw, memorializing children killed by the IDF while calling for a ceasefire in Gaza.
“Nobody on this fuckin’ list made it to the age of four,” he said onstage. “It’s not complicated, don’t let nobody tell you that shit.” He tells me that he can’t even fathom how long the list would be in 2025. When I ask if he told Tyler about his plans before the set, he shakes his head no, noting that he hadn’t yet met the artist. “That’s something that if I had the opportunity, [I] would’ve loved to share just in case it inspired anything on his end,” he says, noting “at the same time, it’s not something you ask for permission to do.”
He was resolute about his message and intentional about how he conveyed it; that same combination of traits comprised Sankofa, which has had three singles so far: “brown sugar” (with Smino), “mini me,” and “lone star.” He explains that the word Sankofa, originated from Ghana’s Akan tribe, means “it’s not taboo to go back for what you’ve forgotten,” and he’s always appreciated how descendants of American slavery amplify the symbol. He first started working on a new album in November of 2023. He workshopped numerous album titles, but the Sankofa theme resonated the most. For him, the 12-track project is a result of “honoring my inner child as a producer on this album more so than anything else I’ve ever made.” He’s said that his previous albums are all an interconnected narrative of his life and times. Sankofa continues the sonic narrative, though, he says, “it’s not from exactly where the last one left off. There’s a little bit of space in between that you can feel.”
“I think throughout the album, [I am] really contextualizing a lot of the feelings that I’ve spoken on in previous projects around anxiety, around depression, just really opening up and examining everything without hesitation,” he says. And he did so with a deeper creative motivation. He admits that he “hit a ceiling” in PG County, and decided to move to LA in January of 2024, a city that he says “forced me to execute as big as possible, because that’s a city where everybody is executing big.”
At 18, living alone across the country, he faced more solitude than ever before. But the isolation brought him closer to his craft: “Something I learned when I moved there was the importance of being able to get into the zone and be by myself sometimes, and have the space to think through everything without any subconscious influence.” He spent time reading articles and watching videos on songwriting, realizing that he wanted his lyricism to give listeners a place to “escape to.”
Even he was a bit surprised by his growth; he says the original version of “brown sugar” felt like “lightning in a bottle,” with lyrics so flirty and catchy that it made him ponder if he could emulate the process over the course of an album. “I was like, ‘This can’t go on this album,’” he recalls. The version with Smino, the album’s lead single, was recorded “months later.” He eventually came to appreciate the gentle track not as Sankofa’s thematic anchor, but as a release from an album with significant tension.
His vivid lyricism and existential anxiety coalesce on “pray for me,” a song with lyrics he says “flowed through” him while writing. The track’s dreamy instrumentation evokes a Hollywood Hills sunset, but the city is no oasis as he feels the fame monster looming. On the second verse he takes the listener with him to a lonely pocket of Los Angeles, pondering his premature demise while belting, “ducking and dodging psychosis got my heartbeat tired” with the urgency of a man on the brink.
On “save,” he ponders fleeting solace and raps, “Don’t ask me shit about me / I don’t know him from a can of paint.” And on “buzzer beater/black christmas,” a two-part song, he offers three snapshots of consequential life moments in three verses, then, on “black christmas,” raps a veritable epilogue (with a beat switch). “Black christmas” was added once he realized “buzzer beater” wasn’t finished — he says these days, some songs take as long as eight months to perfect lyrically.
The halves of the track emit different sonic energy, but both feel full, with live instrumentation from a slew of fellow LA-based “music nerds” who helped him craft Sankofa: pianist and string instrumentalist Johnny May, bassist Jermaine Paul, guitarist Keelan Walters, flutist Amber Navran, drummer Myles Martin, and keyboardist Brian Hargrove. Julian Knowles also plays trumpet on Sankofa. Redveil made it a point to re-explore the first chapter of his music career, focusing more on composition than the samples that have defined his recent work. The album’s heavy themes and warm production is often juxtaposed, exemplifying the classic artistic quandary: feeling everything, even the doldrums, but appreciating the beauty of being alive to experience it.
Sankofa could very well vault redveil into wider visibility. He says he currently feels like he’s at the “perfect level” of celebrity, where he gets noticed in public but not overwhelmingly so. But that soon could change. I learn that he and his colleagues took the MTA train from Manhattan into Brooklyn; I ask him how he’s going to feel if he becomes too much of a star for mundane train rides.
“Dude, I’ll probably hate the fuck out of it,” he admits. “But at the same time, I’ll be able to touch so many lives and help so many people in my own life that it’ll be fine.” When I begin to ask him how he weighs his success with the overall glum state of the world, he cuts me off, drops his food and gestures with his hands while venting about how often he reflects on his privilege. “Just witnessing friends and sometimes younger family — and helping [them] to the capacity that I can — I have that thought so much that if I had to do something other than music, I might be fucked just because it’s so bleak,” he says. That’s what encourages him to be willing to speak up like he did at Flog Gnaw, amplifying the causes “we’re all feeling” as Americans.
In a world full of rappers who love to call their listeners broke, redveil’s self-awareness is refreshing. Equally unique is his perspective on hip-hop’s commercial viability. The day before our conversation, Billboard revealed that there wasn’t a rap song on the Top 40 for the first time in 35 years; social media discourse fixated on hip-hop being dead and the reasons why. Redveil feels the complete opposite: “Hip-hop at its core, and all the values that created it are anti-establishment, right? So people talking about hip hop [being] dead because it’s not charting is an oxymoron.”
“I don’t see it as a net negative because one, there’s still enough for people to eat, even if they’re not on the top 40,” he says. “And also it’s good [to] take some pressure off people that really want to make music in this art form from doing these games and dances to try to metrically compete more than anything else. It’s fucking up the music.”
Metrics didn’t come up once in our conversation. He tells me that he’s looking forward to his upcoming tour, noting that the chance to “scream and rap” is what he enjoys most as a musician. The tour kicks off February 11 at Houston’s House of Blues.
For redveil, the ultimate goal is being an artist who “proves that they have good ideas. When that happens, you’re able to be trusted by the audience to take them somewhere else.” The journey on Sankofa just may be the catalyst of that actuality.
