The first time I see SoFaygo, he’s gliding with an ease that belies his condition. The quiet, boyish 21-year-old rolls into the rehearsal space on Sunset Boulevard on a dreary Los Angeles afternoon in early November with one leg bent and resting on a rolling cushioned knee walker. It keeps weight off his foot, which was injured when his girlfriend’s wall-mounted mirror fell on it. The foot needs surgery, which will take him out of commission for up to ten weeks, and it couldn’t come at a worse time. The injury represents what is, perhaps, his first major setback in a burgeoning career. Faygo is one of the few artists signed to Travis Scott’s imprint, Cactus Jack, and his official debut album Pink Heartz would be dropping November 11th, the moment he’s been willing for nearly 21 years. His single-minded focus has made him an ascendant artist over the past two years, but if you’re into omens, this broken-mirror-induced injury is a little on the nose. He has arrived at the rehearsal space to begin his intense, two-day runthrough for his Nov. 7th appearance on The Jimmy Kimmel Show, where he’ll be performing “Fasho,” a standard Faygo mutant confection off his new album that straddles alt-R&B and autotuned rap.

SoFaygo is often miscast as a member of Atlanta’s new underground, alongside local peers like Ken Carson, Bktherula, and Destroy Lonely. It’s a lazy geographic shorthand: he doesn’t sound like any of them. As his superstar manager Barry Hefner told me, “He’s not a rapper, he’s a pop star.” He makes dreamy, post-Playboi-Carti-and-Uzi emo rap ballads that are promiscuous in style, and can be extremely difficult to define in terms of traditional rap genre categories. His production often features filtered, Soundcloudy synths and 8-bit pings and whistles, the perfect soundtrack for the open-world video games that SoFaygo enjoys in his scarce free time. Bakkwoods, the young Atlanta-bred producer and the Executive Producer of Pink Heartz, calls it “Rage & B.” It could just as easily be called “Twitchcore,” and it has shown huge potential. Faygo’s biggest song to date, “Knock Knock,” got its own viral dance treatment on Tiktok, has over 400 million streams, and, two years after being posted, its splashy, Cole Bennett-directed video is currently at 53 million views.

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But there are serious impediments standing between Faygo and what would have once been preordained stardom. As laid out in a recent Billboard article, labels are increasingly bad at breaking artists these days. In a post-streaming, social-media world, major labels have lost their grip, generally unable to discern the causality between a bonafide “artist” and a song that gets a lot of clicks because of Tiktok’s chaotic algorithm. As such, SoFaygo’s approach to conventional pop stardom in 2022 is a key test case: As an artist on a high-profile but independent label, he’s attempting to write his own, postmodern, up-until-now remarkably successful version of how to accomplish what was once a major label’s job.

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Faygo presents as an introvert, a shy and slightly awkward, nice kid, with his girlfriend of three years in tow. But that unassuming presentation masks an intense ambition. He’s an Eve Harrington-like striver and unapologetic careerist in a young class of internet rappers who make headlines and attract gawkers because of an either real or manufactured aura of enigmatic, esoteric bizarreness. Faygo is different, preternaturally media trained, camera ready, and driven. In conversation, he comes off as someone trying as hard as he can not to make a mistake. He hedges every opinion, which results in contradictory statements, sometimes both offered up within the same conversation. For instance, he says he’s a homebody who dislikes the clubs, but is quick to add he believes going out and experiencing “moments” is of the utmost importance. He’s said that his last album After Me was a response to critics who felt he lacked versatility, but he also believes you have to block out all the noise and let your inner artist be your guide. He voices his love for all the old Dungeon Family shit that comes out of his native Atlanta, mostly made before he was born, and yet he can’t name a favorite Outkast album. This base-covering feels like an extension of his ambition, like he’s always working, doing everything in his power not to turn off any potential fans.

The only time he is truly relaxed, unguarded and open, is when we talk about his work. He has impassioned, savvy reads on both the music he likes and doesn’t like. Like his illuminating take on plugg, the trap-adjacent sub-genre he was spawned in: “When you’re first coming up on SoundCloud and you’re trying to gain that fan base… everybody goes through that phase of type of music, and then you really build on it, and then you reach the next level…. But a lot of people get stuck in that box, as a ‘Plugg Rapper.’ Unfortunately, it doesn’t go too far.” To Faygo, ideas as highfalutin as “genre” and “style” are fluid, as they once were for his role model Drake, or his mentor Travis. The music he was making before, like the music he makes now, feels more like skin that can be easily shed. Like Bruce Lee’s dictum about water, whatever he’s recording in the moment is a pop container he’s filling for the time being. It’s just a means to an end, with that end being his eventual, inevitable stardom.

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