Teenage Rap Phenom Redveil Is Growing Up on Record

The Maryland hip-hop upstart released his breakout album on his 18th birthday last year. What’s next?

Eighteen-year-old rapper-producer redveil gets most of his samples from digital databases like Tracklib and Splice, but from the way he combs through stacks of vinyl, you’d think he was a traditionalist unstuck in time. On an overcast fall afternoon at Village Revival Records in downtown Manhattan, he digs quietly and patiently: The loudest thing about him is the image of a cowboy who rides across the chest of his denim jacket. “Cover art is one of the first things I look for when listening to a new album,” he says, studying the brightly colored Cubist portrait that adorns experimental guitarist Adrian Belew’s 1986 album Desire Caught by the Tail.

He spends much of his time browsing the store’s gospel selection. His mother took him to church every Saturday for most of his life, and often played gospel around their Prince George’s County, Maryland home. “I love how emotional gospel music is,” he says. Learn 2 Swim, his breakout third album, released on his 18th birthday last spring, channels similarly big feelings, its boasts and flexes dovetailing with stories of adolescent ennui and the triumph of making it to the other side. He emerges from the racks with Golden Gospel Jubilee, a 1976 compilation with a woman praying on the cover, her dark brown Afro blending in with the black background.

Learn 2 Swim’s own cover features a painting by the artist alleuu that depicts veil submerged in water, his hand covering his jawline—almost prayerful—as he floats against a purple horizon dotted with clouds. The image is soulful and pensive, a representation of the transition into adulthood, reflecting the music’s dance between risk and comfort on the way to maturity. For every propulsive Learn 2 Swim track like “diving board” or “pg baby,” there are stretches steeped in painful memories, like the missed connection in the second verse of “shoulder,” or veil’s acknowledgment of suicidal thoughts on “automatic.” The beats, which veil produced himself, blend live and programmed sounds into intricate, cascading shapes. 

“Learning to swim is about how you fit into the water,” he later explains over pizza. “How much it’ll take for you to sink, how much it’ll take for you to stay afloat. It’s not a concept album, but that’s the theme.”

veil’s parents, a Canadian-Jamaican mother and a father from New Orleans by way of the Caribbean island of Saint Kitts, separated when he was young, and he spent his youth traveling between their homes in PG County. Mom streamed gospel stations on Pandora; dad played classic R&B and hip-hop; veil’s older brother listened to underground rap and go-go music. By the time veil turned 10, he was playing his brother’s drum kit, which led to a short stint in a church band with his cousins. A year later, encounters with albums by Tyler, the Creator, J. Cole, and Logic inspired him to write songs of his own. He learned piano at 12, and his growing understanding of music theory helped broaden his skills as a producer. By the time he was 15, he had built a modest following on SoundCloud and Twitter.

In 2019, at 15, he released his debut, Bittersweet Cry, which he dubs a “comfort project made largely for myself.” There are flashes of the seamless subgenre alchemy that define his most recent work, but his sound truly began to take shape when he released the loosie “Soulfood” in 2020. Until then, he was wary of mixing and matching styles, but “Soulfood”—with its old-school samples chopped to accommodate modern, slippery flows—went viral on Twitter, attracting attention from rappers like YBN Nahmir and BROCKHAMPTON’s Dom McLennon. Its bouncy melody and newfound confidence inspired what would eventually become veil’s sunny sophomore album Niagara.“I was at a pivotal point in my life,” he says. “I just felt happier and I wanted to make music that reflected that.” 

His new outlook resonated with listeners. Upon Niagara’s release, comedian Zack Fox shared a link to the album with his hundreds of thousands of Twitter followers. Genre-hopping musician quinn and New York rapper MIKE both reached out to veil shortly after. “Everything I was seeing just seemed fake,” he says, laughing. “People I’d looked up to for a long time, in a matter of days, were giving me looks. Seeing how fast people I looked up to were diving into my shit validated something in myself: that I was capable of making the music thing happen. That was the first taste of, ‘Nah, you got this.’”

On Learn 2 Swim, veil incorporated piano into his production for the first time. By combining live instruments, samples, and booming 808s, he’s following in the footsteps of everyone from A Tribe Called Quest and Dr. Dre to Tyler and J. Cole. But there’s a freshness to his style, an understanding that every subgenre of rap feeds back into the whole. Consider the way the stuttering hi-hats patter behind the piano chords that open “diving board,” or how synths, samples, and 808s plink throughout “automatic” like disparate stars coming together to form a single constellation. “My goal was to try to blend, to try to have that middle ground of sounds. It’s not easy to do and it takes a lot of fooling around,” he says. “This is the first body of work I made where every cut felt like me more than anybody else.”

Lyrically, Swim leans further into melancholy than Niagara, without ever tipping into nihilism. The gratitude for progress is still there, but he’s more open to revealing his struggles and how they push him to reap deeper rewards. “I swear it’s something ’bout my people only finding solace in the pen,” he says near the end of “mars,” the sentimental piano and twinkling synths amplifying the sadness of that statement. That’s heavy coming from anyone, but especially from someone who wasn’t even 18 at the time of recording. veil attributes the success of Learn 2 Swim to that growing honesty. “A lot more people were telling me that the album got them through shit,” he says.

Pitchfork: After the trial and error of your first two projects, how did Learn 2 Swim come together?

redveil: I feel like people that came before us in the previous generation of underground hip-hop, they’ve already established these styles. They’ve already done it and they’ve done it well. That’s not my job to do that; it’s my job to do whatever the next thing is, to evolve. I realized I wanted to make some more stuff with instrumentation, and combine that with sampling. That was the blueprint. I hadn’t heard it blended in a way that I really enjoyed yet. 

I wanted Bittersweet Cry, Niagara, and whatever the next project was to be one continuous story. Albums, to me, are like really big diary entries, like a year of my life. I wanted it to be the natural progression of Niagara, because that was this high point for me. I wanted to come back to a middle ground, like a reality check. That was the tone going into it. I was getting older and I figured it was time to show that. 

Right now, my main focus—and this is something I’ve learned from performing—is to not overthink shit. And to just make music that makes people feel really good. Doing that is still detailed, but the details aren’t overpowering; they’re details that come on a whim.

Were you surprised by how well Learn 2 Swim was received?

It’s always hard to tell how much people are gonna like it. You can play music for people and they’ll like it, but then you put it out and no one cares. It was cool to see my stuff out in the wild after I put it out: seeing people talk about it and share it and it becoming a part of the hip-hop conversation. With Learn 2 Swim, I started feeling like an equal to people I’m fans of, and felt a level of acceptance I’d never felt. It was exciting that this album was so impressive to people, because I know I can get better.

What have your learned on tour while opening for artists like Freddie Gibbs and Denzel Curry? 

Numbers are really small on a screen. One thousand people, especially on social media, doesn’t feel like a lot, because it’s so competitive. You never really feel like you’re popular enough on social media, so no matter how many people interact with your stuff, you can never tell. But when you see that many people in front of you, it’s a lot. That’s the biggest thing I got from touring: perspective. I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to know how many people my music touches, and that’s super exciting, too. It’s always gonna be more than you realize. 

Through all the co-signs and new fans, where do you feel you fit into this landscape? What does redveil bring to the table that no one else does? 

My purpose is to make as many people feel understood and comforted and loved as possible. And not only for them to feel comforted, but to feel like they can do anything that they want to do and that they can go in the direction of anything that feels the most right to them. It sounds cliché, but it’s really not. It’s so real. I feel like everyone has their own shit to do, and it’s about whether you lean into it fully. I want to lean into it fully.