Che’s ready to wake the dead

Across show-stopping festival dates and one ear-ringing studio session, the 18-year-old Atlanta artist walks us through the creation of his new project REST IN BASS.

You ready? YOU READY?? … OPEN THAT SHIT THE FUCK UP ROLLING LOUUUUUUUUUUD! WIDER!! WIDER!!! OPEN THAT SHIT UP!!!! OPEN THAT SHIT UPPPPP!!!!!!!

It’s March 16, and I’m in the pit at Rolling Loud California’s smallest stage, sandwiched between teenagers and early twenty-somethings corralled into a square of glorified parking lot between spray-painted shipping containers. Wearing a zebrastripe mask, Che bounds from one end of the stage to the other, screeching happily as the crowd raps every bar from his thermonuclear 2024 single “Pizza Time.” Behind him, a flurry of hypersaturated graphics by close collaborator Gavin Matson match the intensity of his sinister, sugary sound.

“I gotta do something with my life before it’s over,” Che tells me a few months later. “I want to be heard. I need to be heard, because I have a message I’m trying to get across.”

Now it’s 10 PM on a Friday night in late May. We’re holed up at Impulse Studios in Manhattan’s Garment District, Game 2 of the Eastern Conference Finals glowing on the TV as Che plays track after track from his forthcoming sophomore album REST IN BASS. His team had been eyeing an April release at the top of the year, but Che wasn’t satisfied with the material for the album. It’s been in the works since his late summer 2024 debut Sayso Says, the release that cemented Che as a torchbearer for a new generation of underground hip-hop. “We’ve been in this process for some months now, trying to bring me to a different headspace.” So the date has been pushed back again and again, to the point that the final mixes for REST IN BASS still haven’t been submitted.

Che describes his music as “rap slash electronic,” but where his debut pulled from rainbowy EDM and nightcore vocaloid, RIB is sharper and darker, sawtooth synths grating against open hi-hats and hollowed-out 808s, degraded samples mired beneath sludgy basslines and plodding drums. Some songs are so loud their mixes fully redline, glitching out when Che attempts to play them through the studio speakers (“Boss Up,” “MDMA”). Others are already stitched together just so, like a track tentatively called “U Da Shit” where Che references Rihanna over a Crystal Castles flip. “MANNEQUIN” is a strong contender for song of the summer — think “GNARLY” by KATSEYE for Zoomers whose J Hope is Nettspend.

Che often fixates on death in his music, but RIB takes things full kamikaze, from yelping “I just put my opp block on a fucking canvas” on “Hellraiser” to frequently detailing his own demise. On standout “Dior Leopard,” he shrieks, “go 27 club, kill myself, Cobain!” before namedropping K3, while “Die Young” bleakly declares, “I’m gon’ die young, we ain’t never growing up.”

“My love for music is so dire. The sound, the speakers, no matter what, you hear it,” Che says. “And I’ll die for the music, so — REST IN BASS.”

Born Chase Shaun Mitchell, Che grew up an only child in Atlanta. His free time was mostly spent “playing with my partners outside a lot, having fun, being reckless.”

“I was definitely in my own shell,” he says. “But if you got to know me, I definitely got jokes to crack with you.”

Around the house, Che’s parents played “a lot of dirty trap music,” including Bankroll Fresh, Street Money Boochie, and Lil Wayne. He traces his love for dance music back to his mom’s affinity for R&B, and cites Future and Young Thug as formative influences, “even without their rapping, just their mindset, the person they are.”

“I had no idea what I was gonna do when I was younger honestly,” he admits. “When I found my love for music later on in my life, I appreciated it because [music] was always a part of me.”

Che is among a growing contingent of rappers to blow up off TikTok, but of their cohort, he’s one of the most successful. Winter 2022 singles “agenda” and “euphoria” fit more neatly under the label of digicore, but the former’s success in particular healthily eclipsed many of his peers in that subgenre as well as its better-known, commercially-fracked sibling hyperpop.

Around this time Che was in a Discord collective called 4ersona that included prettifun and Specxfic; skaiwater and Rich Amiri both contributed to their summer 2022 mixtape O’Four. On an early track like “tomb,” you can hear Che’s wall-of-sound approach coming into focus, though he’s reticent on that era of his career. “I can’t really speak on that,” Che snickers when I ask how the group met.

Last summer’s Sayso Says capped off a year of growth. “That was the most concentrated I’ve been for an album,” Che says, citing the research and worldbuilding that went into the music and its presentation. From strobing victory lap “SASKA YOU MADE IT” to 3024 D.A.R.E. ad “NUNCA HACER COCAINA,” Sayso Says melds rage rap with sparkling synths and rave-ready rhythms. EDM-inflected hip-hop often overplays its hand, better suited for the kandi-swap festival circuit than SoundCloud playlists. Effusive and ecstatic, Che struck a precise sweet spot on his debut.

“There’s no right or wrong way to make music. But there is a basis to it at the same time… Just doing your research and understanding all concepts of it, so you can be able to appeal to every genre, no matter who. Oh, you wanna hear an electronic song? I have it for you. ‘I wanna hear a pop song,’ I have it for you, bet.”

Che’s love of overwhelming sonics stems from his appreciation for Slayer, Black Flag, and The Misfits, and he brings a similar more-is-more ethos to his own music. On last year’s “miley cyrus” and “pizza time,” blackhole 808s produced by prettifun slingshot Che’s delirious AutoTune flow to stellar new heights.

Those tracks didn’t appear on his last project, but their balance of joyous melodies and blunt-force bass feels key to understanding how Che arrived at the caustic palette for REST IN BASS. Some of these songs have been in the works since Sayso, although he reassures me the majority are fresh. That’s partly due to leaks (“It feels like they’re watching me get dressed”) and partly because Che really loves the new material he’s been recording.

“It’s just something people haven’t heard,” he says. “And I want to give it to them.”

Several tracks follow in the footsteps of Che’s showstopping verse on Molly Santana’s May album Molly And Her Week of Wonders. Like his feature on “Unstoppable,” REST IN BASS cribs heavily from Playboi Carti’s rapidfire, high-pitch flows, but where Carti uses his upper register to convey menace or abjection, Che is more carefree, his falsetto like a firework streaking skyward. He squeals, “they say I sold my soul, okay let em buy it” with abandon over an azure beat on “Finger Fuck” and comes across remarkably sober when his delivery softens on “MDMA,” murmuring, “I hope you listen to every word I say […] the party never ends, I’m glad you came.”

Whatever Che lacks in technical skill, he makes up for with thematic emphasis, and so he’s unconcerned by those who would dismiss him as a Carti clone. “I am inspired, so it can’t hurt my feelings when I know I’m true to myself,” he says.

The singles and snippets Che has put out so far this year have broadly come through neon and plush as a Murakami pillow, but the songs he played me at the studio in May were notably tougher and more abrasive. Che always made the sort of tunes that demand you crank the volume up, but REST IN BASS is eager to live up to its name.

The harder sound is mirrored by writing that feels possessed whatever the subject matter. January single “Pose For The Pic” presses on the tenderest parts of che’s discography, those fleeting moments where wide-eyed youth meets the heart-on-sleeve influence of Hayley Williams and Alice Glass (tatted on his ribcage) to truly and honestly feel. Che might be crooning about self-sufficiency, but when he shudders, “a vampire needs his blood / without you collapse my lungs / without you relapse on drugs,” it’s as raw as a skinned knee. Later, beyond lost without his lover, he’ll coo, “You like my eyes, yeah I’m blind as a bat.”

“I just want to be a real rockstar for this album,” Che tells me in June. We’re backstage at Summer Smash in the Chicago suburbs, sweating through our respective outfits amidst a mounting heat wave. It’s been three weeks since I saw him at the studio in New York and three months since I saw him on stage in Los Angeles; he’s had bags under his eyes every time we’ve spoken prior, but today they’re accentuated with dark eyeshadow, so he looks not just tired but undead. Initially, I think Nosferatu, but when Che takes the stage backed by muted tone images of the crucifixion (courtesy again, Gavin Matson), he comes across more like a blasphemous zombie.

As the crowd elbows and moshes around me, I suddenly remember something Che told me back in New York, after we talked about his time opening on tour for Sahbabii this spring. Whenever we met, Che was thoughtful and unfailingly polite, down to earth despite his escalating ambitions. But occasionally, he bared his fangs, smirking if not quite snarling.

“I want the crowd to feel like they’re at a ritual and they’re just here to praise me […] It’s like a savior of music thing. I want people to hear my music and feel safe, like there’s no struggles at all, nothing to worry about at all in the world.

“The best thing for me is to always remind myself that it’s not a job,” he says, growing more serious. “Like, you’re having fun. This is what you do for fun. Once I put that into perspective, I never get tired of it.”