GoldLink

There wasn’t exactly a place in the landscape for an artist like GoldLink—until GoldLink made one. Raised in and around Washington, D.C., the rapper (born D’Anthony Carlos in 1993) started writing music in his late teens, staking out an uncharted space at the intersection of hip-hop, house, electronic music, and R&B—a colourful, head-spinning sound that made him stand out instantly. In 2014, he released his debut mixtape, The God Complex; the next year, he made the XXL Freshman Class. Buoyed by a mentoring credit from Def Jam cofounder Rick Rubin, And After That, We Didn’t Talk followed in 2015, striking a balance between narrative grit and a sparkling, effervescent sound. In 2017, he released At What Cost, featuring the Grammy-nominated “Crew.” Alongside MCs and producers like Anderson .Paak, KAYTRANADA, Flume, and Chance the Rapper, GoldLink’s sound represents an ever-broadening sense of what hip-hop and dance music can do, imagining a borderless club world where affiliations of genre and region bow to the music’s overall feel: not rap, not electronic, but what GoldLink has playfully called “future bounce”—and he’s making it right now.