I often wonder if the musicians we love set out to leave their listeners with a specific feeling, almost as if they were engineering our brains to experience certain emotions. I posed this question to the rapper Lelo, a young Detroit artist who excels riding the waves of psychedelic beats.

“Some people watch sad movies for comfort. Some people watch sad movies to be sad. Some people never want to watch sad movies. Some people feel nothing from sad movies. I want to be honest in whatever mood that I’m feeling when I’m recording a song. They can feel however they want when they listen to it” – Lelo

His music is resonating. At age 25, he can safely say he has momentum, sitting at 1 million monthly listeners and carrying co-signs by Pierre Bourne and Earl Sweatshirt, both of whom he’s been in the studio with recently.

Lelo has goals, but his primary focus is to provide. His dad was a rapper, and he says his mom spent her whole pregnancy in the studio. It’s easy to imagine baby Lelo hearing music recorded and coming out of the womb a trap music mozart.

“I’ve heard certain things that he’s written, but I’ve never really got to hear anything he recorded. I’m sure it was Dilla adjacent. it just makes so much sense for that time [in Detroit].” – Lelo

A lot of new rappers have arrived in the 2020’s, boosted by new platforms popping up online such as OurGenerationMusic and UndergroundSound, Instagram pages that have leveraged their platforms into much more. Lelo performed at a recent UGS festival, thrown off the backs of a viral “UGS CYPHER”. He appeared along with artists like Nino Paid and xaviersobased, planting his flag formally into the scene along with his peers. Lelo’s music has mass appeal, given that its roots are in Detroit hip-hop but its branches extend well into mainstream adjacent alternative trap music. Lucki fans in particular have grasped onto Lelo’s music, a comparison he bristles slightly at.

“I definitely had a stint in high school. but like the moment I decided to take music seriously I wasn’t really listening to anything anymore. I think by the nature of the beats sonically a lot of people hear my music and think I have to be a Lucki aficionado, and honestly that’s not really what it is. He opened the door sonically for me to be who I am right now. So I’m super appreciative of that.” – Lelo

Through conversation Lelo conveys how respectful and articulate he is. He has a well of music knowledge to pull from, partly inspired by his grandfather, a big music fan himself. In his house he would hear the soft notes of jazz and smooth jazz, bits of older R&B, and even had some Yacht Rock. “It was kind of everything when I was a kid. My grandfather is a huge fan of Michael Franks. So when he would drive me around, he was always playing Michael Franks. And I think that stuck with me. just him as an artist and the way he speaks on his records kind of really rubbed off on me.”

I think it gives him a massive advantage, given that a lot of young rappers haven’t necessarily developed a deep palette of places to draw from, with some like Lil Yachty drawing the ire of the internet when revealing that they haven’t heard touchstone classic like Jay Z’s The Black Album and Reasonable Doubt. His worldliness likely also has to do with his time at art school, majoring in painting and minoring in art history. He attended Albion College, a private liberal arts school about 2 hours out of Detroit. While that experience helped shape him, he was too far from Detroit, the city he reveres. “I’m grateful for the experience. It definitely grew me, and I really used it to prove to myself that I could still find a way to do music in college.” He’s even made the cover art for some of his songs, using the skills he’s gathered.

“I’m still hungry.” – Lelo

Lelo started listening to hip-hop more heavily in middle school, when a friend introduced him to music from outside Detroit, like Odd Future and Pro Era, touchpoints of early 2010’s rap. Hearing Earl Sweatshirt‘s methodical flows was a turning point, as the early edgy mixtapes crept their way into his MP3 player. Earl, a rapper who currently finds himself at the intersection of several scenes and regions, recently shared the studio with Lelo. “He’s really meticulous about everything.” His process inspired him, and he mused about the differences between punching in and writing, 2 forms of the process that he uses.

His recording process, though, is often DIY. He lives with his 2 main producer collaborators, recording in his bedroom. Shogun, who’s woozy beats show up all over Lelo’s discography, is described as a student of rap and R&B history, and Cdub. “Cdub is like an encyclopedia when it comes to everything. House, ghetto tech, every type of techno, but mainly Detroit techno.” Lelo started recording more in his freshman year of high school, and taking it more seriously his junior year. That’s also when he started to develop his style, shedding the clothing he wore that was influenced by his father. Detroit is once again a throughline here, as Lelo feels like everything he does should represent his city. “There’s brands I’m not going to wear because they don’t represent me.”

New Detroit is a wave that Lelo facilitated, and is now riding. Rappers like Babyface Ray and Veeze are some of the bigger names out of the city, but Lelo points specifically to 42 Dugg as a reason the scene has blown up. “I think the pieces have moved for a long time for this to happen. people then came to the city and worked with everybody, and there was a huge boom with 42 Doug.” From Motown to Dilla to Eminem, Detroit has always influenced the world culturally, even as the economic status of the city has shrunk due to manufacturing moving elsewhere. I detect a certain stubbornness in Lelo’s desire to put on for the city and his people. This is the only outcome he envisions. As he puts it, “The culture of Detroit resonates throughout the world.” The ultimate goal, though, is for his people to make it.

“Feeding my family is the biggest thing. Making sure my people straight.” – Lelo

His new single, “On The Wall” feat. Babyface Ray continues the climb, with an extraterrestrial beat imbued with horns from 4amjuno. Lelo and Babyface have clear chemistry, binding the New Detroit scene together. No doubt they’ll continue the legacy of the city, while building something entirely new.