Rob49 on “WTHELLY,” Let Me Fly, and the secret to hits

The New Orleans rapper’s new album doubles down on his established strengths and widens his sonic range

Not long after our call, Rob49 heads courtside. He’s a guest of honor at the Indiana Pacers game thanks to “WTHELLY,” his confounding, massively popular new single; memes have spread across social media thanks to its outro, where the New Orleans rapper riffs on the song’s incredulous title: What the Helly-antte? What the Helly Berry? What the Hellyburton?. That last one, a namecheck of Indiana point guard Tyrese Haliburton, will soon have him beaming on the hardwood at Gainbridge Fieldhouse for photos that will push the @pacers account to his 1.2 million followers (the population of Indianapolis? Just under 900,000). When we chat in late April, “WTHELLY” has been out for all of four weeks, and everybody wants a piece.

“I knew ‘WTHELLY’ might be big, but I’m not gonna lie, to be a game changer is crazy,” Rob says of the song’s runaway momentum. “The only thing I wanted out of ‘WTHELLY’ was to change the culture and make people start saying ‘what the helly’ – but it wind up being bigger than that forreal.”

That might be putting it mildly: there’s big, and then there’s Justin Bieber saying he’s a fan and canoodling through a syrupy coda on the remix big. 18 months ago Rob49 told The FADER, “I could not ever drop another song and I’d feel like I made it;” these days, being a hometown hero isn’t even close to enough.

Rob49 gets his name from New Orleans’s Fourth and Ninth Wards, where he grew up in the Desire and Iberville projects (the former since razed, the latter gentrified). Growing up, he played basketball until suffering an injury. “I’m kind of glad I stopped playing basketball in 11th grade,” Rob says. “I ain’t wanna be one of them athletes [whose] dreams don’t come true [and] now they just wanna kill themselves.”

This blunt pragmatism is paired with an unflinching discipline, which you might chalk up to Rob’s Christian faith or his two-year-stint in the army. And while his songs can be outlandish, there’s at least a sense that the antics largely stop when the cameras are off; Rob tells me he spends most days “living a normal life” with his long-term girlfriend, who he’s been dating since before he started rapping four years ago.

Rob tells me he recorded “WTHELLY” in one take just before leaving the studio. “All my hits come out like this,” he says with a smile. For his detractors, this may seem a damning confession. Although far from a mumble rapper, his biggest music often inspires a similar revulsion among old-heads and lyrical traditionalists, 10% wordplay and 90% impassioned delivery. Rob raps as if yelling across a crowded club, in a barked staccato that recalls DMX or Waka Flocka Flame; it’s these bellowed cadences that lodge in the brain, capable of making you memorize the most unwieldy sentences.

Take his scene-stealing verse on Travis Scott’s 2023 album UTOPIA, where Rob does away with that most basic of rap fundamentals, the end rhyme. “It’s funny, all my popular verses that they say I can’t rhyme, I was thinking too hard on them bitches,” he explains. “So when I’m saying stuff like, how that song [‘TOPIA TWINS’] go? It’s so hard to hide I’ma dog n***a I make a mistake and show it… Like I would have rhymed, but me thinking too hard, trying to say the swaggiest thing — the swaggiest thing don’t always match what you said before.”

It’s been nearly two years since Rob’s last album 4God II. When I ask where he feels like he’s improved since, he pauses. “My word structure in the song. Because I used to be saying too [few] words, and I never got to the point of saying too many words, but now I say just enough words to make it fall on a beat how it’s supposed to,” he says. “And I’m rhyming better now.”

It’s a modest statement from an artist who describes his early music as “terrible” and even considers some of his forthcoming songs “small fry.” Set for a May 23 release, Rob49’s new album Let Me Fly marks a dramatic progression, a concerted effort to build “a legacy that can’t be denied.” When I ask the sort of legacy he’d like to leave behind, he’s cheerfully nonspecific: “I just wanna be the one that did it right, like JAY-Z type.”

To that end, Let Me Fly expands on Rob’s sonic palette with saxophone-led struggle raps (“Honest”) and gossamer delicate ballads addressed to secret lovers (“Tell Nobody”). The tenderer subject material coaxes Rob’s abraded baritone into clearer, melodic tones, closer to Rylo Rodriguez or NoCap. These songs are still in close conversation with Rob’s bread-and-butter sound, a blend of swooning violin and minor-key piano equally indebted to Atlanta trap and Chicago drill, but pushing away from the concussive 808s of his harder songs yields some of his most personal verses to date.

On “Hear Me Momma,” the rapper catalogues familial trauma, admitting, “I was in a dark place and wanted to kill myself.” He goes on to detail close brushes with death and the law, selling weed as a minor, feeling as though he’s got “an empty soul inside.” Rob has been romantic and pensive by turns in the past, but his direct, plainspoken raps were never too vulnerable or specific; now he’s leaving it all on wax.

Let Me Fly is the result of two years of work and refinement, though much of the album’s front half was recorded in 2025 — in fact, Rob was still cutting new music days before our interview. Ass-throwing anthem “So Sexyy” encapsulates the album’s careful balance between impulse and precision: Rob tells me if Sexyy Red hadn’t rapped the hook exactly how he hoped, he would have used AI to fix it in post. But no generative model could ever hope to spit out YTB Fatt’s verse on that same song, which opens, “I jerk off every time you post a picture on your IG / I beat my dick every time you post a picture on your IG.” It’s the only time on the album Rob gets out-raunched.

These songs showcase Rob’s growing range, but Let Me Fly is unsurprisingly at its best when the bass is turned up. Rob49 has always been a larger-than-life vocalist, his voice a blunt instrument booming forth from speakers as if shouting down the beat, but here he sounds practically possessed, gnashing and snarling through songs like an apex predator in a nature doc. His homie is hooking up with a Vietnamese nail tech, so the whole crew gets manicures for free (“Widebody”); he sends hits “through FaceTime” from 30,000 feet in the air (“JetWifi”). “Pick Your Poison” unfurls a hellish, roiling beat as Rob49 plays a sick game of Either/Or: “You tryna cry in G-Shocks or a Carti? / You tryna fuck a boss or your stalker?” Tension ratchets up with every line until Rob’s verses inevitably collapse into rhythmic huffing, as if manically scanning the room for something else to flex on your girlfriend with.

“You know why I started rapping my ass off?” Rob asks rhetorically. “When I first made “Vulture Island,” I went to Future house and he said, ‘You finally started to rap your ass off, huh?’ Cuz I was saying, Yeet yeet yeet yeet. And he knows what makes the hits – that’s why I approach music how I approach it.”

Rob49 is the biggest rapper from New Orleans since Weezy F. Baby, and he has a similar knack for outrageous bars. “Told that bitch, ‘you on your cycle then put it in your ass,’” he crows on “Scarface,” a mid-album highlight includes a spoken word Birdman interlude and the line “I done seen more rap n***as act like me than Lil Wayne!” The paranoid strings of trapstar parable “Pack Flipper” (the “small fry” Rob was surprised to learn I enjoyed) are less in your face than other tracks, but when Rob yelps, “The price on weed just ain’t the same no more / I was praying to god for a plug and he ain’t come,” his hopscotch flow sticks to you.

Combined with his “first thought, best thought” recording style, this impulse can lead Let Me Fly into even more unseemly territory, as on “Angel Reese,” an early album cut Rob names as one of his favorites. “Brodie call me from the fuckin feds, say he want Angel Reese,” Rob raps on the song’s hook. “He want Latto sister […] He so used to me fucking project whores, I’m tryna show him some / He feel like if I fucked he fucked, yeah that’s my fucking brother.” I’m going to guess the WNBA won’t be posting TikToks when the song officially releases.

Rob49 is navigating the moment’s central tension, between established institutions desperate for subcultural cool and savvy celebrities who want to cash in. From GloRilla twerking at political rallies to “Not Like Us” at the Super Bowl Halftime Show Presented by Apple Music, it’s clear that previous taboos around cosigning rappers have shifted. So long as an artist avoids total cancellation, edgy reputations seem more like a feature than a bug for engagement-minded social media managers.

But even at his least SFW, Rob49 remains shrewd about his public image, mindful that the Pacers might not want their jersey right next to a clip of two women making out. (He’s still going to post the clip, but it’ll be buried in a photodump or deleted the next day). Assisted by features from G-Herbo, Quavo, Cardi B, and more, Let Me Fly positions Rob49 among a cadre of hustlers turned entrepreneurs who have managed to professionalize an inherently unprofessional occupation.

“Just like they love Tupac, you gotta love this, because it’s a following you need to tap into,” Rob says. “As long as you Him? And as long as you continue to be Him? The brands are going to come. So just do you.”