When I reach him over Zoom in the winter, Xaviersobased — the 22-year-old rapper poised to carry the mantle for New York as a new rap underground breaks into the mainstream — is settling into his first apartment by himself. The move up to Yonkers comes a few days after the release of his well-received debut album, Xavier, a 21-track journey into the Manhattan-born musician’s wide-ranging sensibility. Production quirks like volume and pitch changes, multiple beat switches, brash sonic redirections punctuated by everything from samples of glass shattering to synth stabs puncturing through sheaths of filters, make for a kind of chaotic symphony that feels deliriously of the moment.
Since 2020, he’s been dropping mixtapes for a growing cult audience built around a coterie of musicians who all came up around the same time. Names like Nettspend and Osamason, who in recent years have come to represent rap’s youngest cohort, firmly rooted in the digital age. For Xavier, who signed with Atlantic last year, this album represents a moment of growth. “I just really wanted to drop a body of work that I put my most effort in,” he says. “It’s probably the most effort I put in something so far. That was really my goal: to just put effort in something and see what happens.”
The album is less about polishing away the roughness of his earlier work than proving he can control it. Xavier’s sound reflects a cluster of micro-languages that have effectively been memed into existence. There’s a concept in online circles described as having “trained ears,” that is, the ability to parse through the maximalist production style that runs through the scene. “I feel like a big part of it is like, I don’t know, people being neurodivergent and things like that,” he says half-jokingly. “It’s not even just that, though, because I feel like there’s people that are neurotypical, too, that understand it. It is just like, if you know, you know.”
His sound is not totally unlike the freewheeling, stream-of-consciousness rap of Lil B the Basedgod, from whom Xavier gets his stage name. In the 2010s, having an affinity for Lil B was almost like membership in a secret society of listeners whose ears were attuned to the same oddball frequency. “But then there’s those people that fucking hate it and end up getting trained,” Xavier says. “It’s also the type of shit that grows on you.”
Born Xavier Lopez in 2003 and raised on the Upper West Side, Xaviersobased started making music in his early teens, uploading tracks online as he developed a loose style shaped both by New York’s underground and the internet’s genreless churn. His breakout came with songs like “Patchmade” and “In Da Booth,” which circulated widely on SoundCloud and TikTok, positioning him as a central figure in the city’s new wave of internet-native rap.
Xavier says he “grew up on the internet,” which explains a track title like “Negative Canthal Tilt”: He says some fans were trolling him with the term, taken from the viral “looksmaxxing” community. (It is, apparently, a sign of one’s face being unattractive.) He took the joke in stride, and decided to make it into a song. “I fuck with the meme culture and shit,” he says. “I definitely had a little meme page account, some funny shit. But yeah, we got to fuck with the memes though, for sure.”
Even so, Xaviersobased is meticulous about the sonics in his music, no matter how chaotic they might seem. He recalls how one track, “Seen a Lot of Things,” became an obsession. “I feel like the mix on that song still sounds not like how I wanted it to, but we got it as close as we could,” he says. “That one took a while, bro. We probably did, like, 60, 70 mixes of that song. No joke.”
And yet, he keeps returning to the same internal rule: Don’t overthink. “I don’t really be too heavy on goals. I always say as long as I’m doing what I’m supposed to do, I’m going to be what I’m supposed to be, and I’m happy with that.”
