In an interview with Apple Music around the release of his 2020 album, Artist 2.0, the Bronx-born rapper A Boogie wit the Hoodie described the liberation of changing things up. He’d been playing the guitar—no lessons, just wanted to see what came out. Every time he felt like he might be settling into a lane—something street, something melodic, something trap, something more classic—he challenged himself to find another wave. After all, isn’t that what hip-hop was about? That dynamic, that living culture? “It gets crazy when you experiment on your sound,” he says. “That’s when it gets interesting. And that’s why I was like, damn, people should really try this shit and have fun with their art. It’s not even music at the end of the day—it’s art, because people visualize in their head when they’re listening to it.” Born Artist Dubose in 1995, A Boogie—a nickname adopted in part from the 2002 movie Paid in Full—started rapping in that fertile, post-Drake, post-Future-and-Young Thug era where distinctions between divergent attitudes in rap—bars vs. melody, street vs. pop—blurred to their breaking point. He wasn’t an attention hound or big on social media and interviews—a reticence that made him a little more interesting than some of his peers, not to mention called back to the classic image of the stoic New York street rapper. His key tracks—“Jungle,” “Still Think About You,” “Numbers,” “Streets Don’t Love You”—don’t chart a course for hip-hop so much as leave a footprint: By the time he did it, he’s got something else on his mind.