“Shout out to my mama/Shout out to my bros,” Tezzus chants with an almost religious fervor on “ØWay.” Perhaps you’ve heard it: a jolt of lightning from the Atlanta rapper that has sparked a viral trend on the strength of those opening lines. Tezzus, who’s part of Young Thug’s revamped, youth-focused YSL lineup, used the song to close out his project The Resurrectiøn. It has the uncanny energy of Atlanta rap’s most productive era in the 2010s, when the music coming out of the city all but forced you out to the clubs.
On a recent late summer afternoon, he’s joined by fellow YSL youth squad member Diamond* at the Rolling Stone offices in Manhattan. The night before, they’d performed in Central Park as part of Young Thug’s New Generation Tour. “I brought my whole crew on the tour, you know what I’m saying?” Tezzus says. “Like, we’re building our own family.”
The two met after Diamond* drove about an hour to buy weed from Tezzus. He had clothes to sell in his car, too, and figured he might make some money on the trip. When he arrived, the place reminded him of a biker clubhouse, with friends hanging out, playing video games and talking to girls. “Just like a little get-together for the bros, for real,” Diamond* tells Rolling Stone. “So it was just cool to be around.”
Tezzus remembers it more succinctly: “And then he never left.”
The Atlanta rappers call their crew ØWay, the expression that’s caught on with their listeners. Depending on the delivery, it can be a greeting, a goodbye, or a declaration of victory.
“We so fucking awesome that the world just ran with it,” Tezzus says. “The world just love to say it so much.”
Their music has caught on, too. Tezzus followed 2024’s Tezzus Khrist with projects including Tezzy Pendergrass, while Diamond*’s Nø Idøls delivered their breakout collaboration, “Bada Bing, Bada Bøøm,” last summer. They linked with streamer Plaqueboymax on “Duality,” then included the song on their joint April mixtape, UY Scuti Bøyz. Both have kept releasing music on their own: Tezzus followed with The Resurrectiøn in June, and Diamond* enlisted DJ Holiday to host July’s Bling Slime Vøl 1.
They’ve brought 14 people along on tour, and Tezzus is confident their friendships will outlast whatever happens in music. “That’s why I feel like we’re going to last longer than everybody, because we really had to grow up together, more than just getting put together to do music.”
Tezzus remembers being five or six years old, performing on his bed for an imaginary crowd. “I always told myself, ‘I’m gonna be a rapper,’” he says. His parents were teenagers when they had him. “They were like my big brother and sister, like we raised each other.” After a fight got him kicked out of school, his father picked him up and asked what he planned to do. His reply: “I’m gonna be a rapper, bro.”
His father bought him a CD player and three discs of beats. He was suspended and had lost his phone privileges. “I used to write all day,” he says. “I write raps and I studied like kings and conquerors.”
Diamond*’s father was a poet. He tried following his example before figuring out how to write to a beat. “Try to do poetry, just like him type shit,” he says. Making music followed after 12th grade.
For Tezzus, the listening habits changed as he got older. His father loved Tupac; he fell for Lil Wayne early. Middle school belonged to Atlanta, with Johnny Cinco, Rich Homie Quan, and Young Thug in rotation. When Thug and Wayne fell out, his hometown allegiance settled it: “Hell no. I gotta ride with the city.”
By high school, he was focused on himself. “I went mute on the world,” Tezzus says. “I’m like, I’m going to be the greatest.”
Getting there meant changing how he lived. “I kept getting in trouble and kept getting locked up,” he says. “Me and Diamond* did so much to try to get righteous, bro.” For two years, they stopped using the N-word in conversation and in their songs.
“We didn’t rap with it. We didn’t say it at all. We took it completely out of our vocabulary.” The point was to “find any sense of strength and power and just being Black.”
Tezzus talks about his voice with similar deliberation. Diamond* recently pointed out how much more he was doing with it, and Tezzus cites Thug’s storytelling as an example.
“Every time he say a story that somebody said, he try to talk like them,” he says. “You got to try to say it in their tone and, like, you gotta kind of paint the picture when you’re an artist.”
For Diamond*, working with DJ Holiday fulfilled an ambition from his years listening to mixtapes. He’d loved Holiday’s work on Chief Keef’s Bang 2. “It was like a childhood checklist,” he says. “He’s still in the streets. He’s still for the people.”
He had another long-awaited moment at Magic City, the club he grew up down the street from. He used to walk past on his way to work, imagining himself among the people pulling up outside.
“I look at all the foreign cars at the front,” Diamond* remembers. “I’ll take over this one day.” When he finally got to celebrate there, he was surrounded by people who remembered those earlier days. “First of all, I’m with the same people that I struggle with,” he says. “We around some of the most gorgeous women in the country.”
“Sometimes, like, I came from shit, bro,” Tezzus says. He compares his own moments of gratitude to the TV show That’s So Raven. “You ever seen That’s So Raven when she go see the future?” His visions send him into the past.
“I really get the moments and I see the past and I see how far I came. And I’d be so grateful. And I’d be so happy,” he says. “And I be so grateful for everybody around me. Like, I really love my friends, bro. I really love my family. I really love my mama.”
He’s noticed a connection between singing about the people he loves and finding a bigger audience. “Every time I fucking make a song about my mother” and shouts ØWay, he says, “I get bigger. And I love my mama and I love my crew. So, like, that’s beautiful, right? Thank you God.”
At the time of the interview, he was looking forward to an Atlanta concert where his mother would see him perform in person for the first time. She already defends him online. “I’d be like, ‘Mom, stop,’” he says.
He credits Diamond* with starting a “home for the homeless,” a description of the family they’ve put together. Keeping everyone together takes some work. Asked how 14 people settle their disagreements, the two acknowledge that sometimes people fight, though talking usually does the job. Tezzus remains committed: “We’re doing this shit our own way.”
He also has a request for Hollywood. While talking about Atlanta and Wakanda, he interrupts himself: “Marvel, put me in the movie, please. I’m ready. I’m a fucking dragon, kid.”
He says he watched Game of Thrones 10 times in a year. House of the Dragon has its attractions, too: “I like to see that dragons have really came back. We got to see what they were really for.” (He still prefers the original.)
The dragon tattoo on his face has an explanation beyond television. “I was born in the Year of the Dragon,” he says. “That’s why I initially got it tatted in my face.”
He livestreamed himself getting the tattoo a couple of years ago. “It had six people on the live,” he says. “Look at me now at Rolling Stones.”
