Future

There’s a good anecdote that Future recounted in an interview—about getting into an argument with a guy who was worried about one of the Atlanta rapper’s engineers. The engineer hadn’t left the studio in a week. Had he even eaten? Don’t worry, Future said—he himself hadn’t left in a week, either, and someone was bringing in Wendy’s from up the block. Barely a season goes by without new music from the rapper born Nayvadius Wilburn (in 1983)—whether it’s a mixtape, solo album, or collaborative project (with Drake, with Gucci Mane, with the producer Zaytoven). But prolific isn’t the half of it. Druggy, raw, slick, and surreal, Future’s sound—crystallized on highlights like 2014’s Honest, 2015’s DS2, and 2017’s HNDRXX—has helped redefine 2010s street rap as something strange and almost avant-garde: trap as modern psychedelia. Not that it isn’t melodic too. Like fellow Atlantan and collaborator Young Thug, Future has a way of bending his voice (often using Auto-Tune) into soulful, often sad shapes, half-rapped and half-sung—the sound of a crooner stuck in space. “The biggest thing is just being yourself all the time,” he told Beats 1 host Zane Lowe in early 2017. “When you try and be yourself all the time, everyone’s not gonna like it. But you gotta wake up with that person. At the end of the day, you can be able to look at the person and be like, You know what, I know I’m being myself; I’m not being anyone else. And that’s the greatest thing about this: It’s me being myself.”