Rio Da Yung OG, IRL: 14 hours with Michigan’s realest rapper

After spending five years in prison, the Flint M.C. is learning how to stand out in the internet’s infinite scroll.

 

This story is part of our fall 2025 series, Offline, where we investigate IRL spaces and explore our relationships with music and the internet.

It’s 2 PM on a Wednesday afternoon in late September and I’m on the second floor of a Soho boutique watching Rio Da Yung OG take his pants off. His bodyguard and a bemused store manager point to the dressing room a few feet away, but Rio’s already kicked off the Louis Vuitton Air Force 1s and peeled his jeans down to his ankles, where they’re skinny enough to snag. Despite his husky build and untoned physique, Rio is deceptively agile, and smoothly executes a forward fold to disentangle himself as his iPhone, a lighter, and a wad of cash thick as a paperback spill forth from his pockets.

Tonight’s show is No.46 on Rio’s first tour, when he’ll play New York for the first time. The day’s schedule is packed and Rio needs a new outfit, which is how I ended up here, politely averting my gaze from the 31-year-old’s Supreme boxer briefs as he shimmies into a pair of crystal-embellished jeans. They fit, and he cuts a quick promo clip for the store then heads for the exit, reclaiming his half-smoked Black & Mild off a ledge outside as we march back to the SUVs. On the walk over, he films a fit check for his spam account and realizes he has no idea what brand of denim he’s wearing.

A year ago, Rio was in federal prison, serving out year four of a five year sentence for possession of a firearm with intent to distribute controlled substances. After his release on December 11, 2024, Rio spent the top half of 2025 recording new music at a furious clip, telling me he made around 500 songs while on house arrest. When we talked in July a few days before the tour kicked off, he was anxious to get on the road and see how the new material was resonating with fans.

“I’m finna be gone the rest of the year,” says Rio. “It’s kind of like going to prison to me: I ain’t know what was ahead of me, but I did it. So I know I can do this.”

 

Born Da’mario Horne-McCullough, Rio was raised in Flint, Michigan, a town of 80,000 an hour north of Detroit best known for its late 2010s lead contamination water crisis. He only began rapping in earnest after his 2019 indictment, and although Rio became synonymous with the region’s hip-hop — rapid-fire punchline rap that’s wildly charismatic one moment, violently sinister the next — he was largely absent during the scene’s rise to national prominence. After his release, Rio was only given sporadic permission to perform before getting the greenlight this summer for his 57-date spree.

“When you locked up, you’ll wreck your brain thinking about the free world,” Rio says on a video call in mid-July. “I just had to be a prisoner. I didn’t read no books, I didn’t rap, I didn’t do nothing but listen to music and get high.
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“It was like a dream,” Rio recalls of his 1,370 day stint with the B.O.P. “I went to sleep, woke up in prison. Then I went back to sleep and woke up and I was free.”

Rio says his time inside was, “like therapy. It helped me be disciplined and patient, cause it was nothing I could do. No amount of money could have helped me, I just gotta stick it out.” On his jailhouse MP3 player, he listened to YouTube leaks of Rylo Rodriguez and NoCap, cycling through the same handful of songs on repeat. To hear Rio tell it, his time incarcerated was meditative, spiritually fruitful, even if he was a touch “rebellious” as far as the prison rules.

Despite the long hiatus, the new material picks up where his outlandish, darkly comic discography left off, teasing out his eye for narrative detail and sharpening his blunted punchlines to a vicious point. “RIO FREE,” a song he recorded approximately 12 hours after walking out of federal prison, starts somberly enough, but that quickly gives way: “60 months in the Feds, it wasn’t shit though,” Rio sneers. Later on he’ll crow, “I drunk a hundred pints in jail, you can ask Sosa / and they ain’t never find my phone, I hid it in the lotion.”

“I was nervous ’cause I was in prison for four years, [and] I didn’t write any songs or nothing. I thought I didn’t have it no more,” Rio says of recording his comeback single. “I kept listening to the beat over and over and I started writing. And once I got like 12 bars, I told them to change the beat and then I just started freestyling.”

The four hour session had its speedbumps. “The power went out in the AirBNB, so we couldn’t record for an hour. And then my baby mama pulled up trying to fight on some crazy shit,” Rio sighs, exasperated. “It almost threw me off, but I ended up taking the energy and just putting it on the song. When I said, baby mama fucking up my mood, man I hate that hoe, that shit had just happened.” One man’s distraction is another’s inspiration.

Rio doesn’t want to go “too industry,” but he does want to reach new audiences. 10 years ago, that might have meant hitting the radio interview circuit and collaborating with industry vets; in 2025, it means filming a barrage of vertical videos and securing a TikTok viral smash with the hottest up-and-comers. In pursuit of the perfect frontal-lobe-gelatinizing clip, we circuitously migrate from Complex offices to the Ocky Way deli, where Rio works the grill alongside influencer Rah Money, and then to On The Radar, where he’ll record a performance and a freestyle.

En route to OTR, Rio silently cues up a playlist of unreleased tunes, gearing up for the shoot. On a particularly menacing cut he plays twice, he muses, “I really wonder what a broke n***a kids saying / like, ‘I really want the shoes, daddy keep playing / my momma got a new boyfriend, he got a pink Benz.’” Lately, Rio’s music has featured more of these farcical vignettes, teasing out a joke for a few lines instead of spraying new ideas every downbeat. That’s ratcheted up the contrast in his raps, his deadpan punchlines brighter than ever, the depths of his chiaroscuro shadows extra bleak.

 

After Rio lipsyncs through a single with fellow Michigander RMC Mike twice, the OTR staff cue up the track he brought to the session, leading to an inadvertent standoff. Rio’s waiting for the beat to wind down to stop rapping, but the guys behind the boards are scared they’ll run out of instrumental before he’s actually finished, looping the beat over twice until Rio finally trails off.

He raps for 7 minutes straight. There’s a moment it seems as if he might fall behind the pocket, when something flashes in his eyes and suddenly, he’s tumbling into an entirely different flow. “I had drank in the water fountain… / Swear to God I’ll try to climb the tallest mountain / ‘fore I / put my trust in a hoe.” $1,000 for a Balenciaga tee; $10,000 for the LV Forces; $100,000 for the rehab Rio needs but won’t do. Rio used to be so broke he rode the bus; Rio used to be so broke he didn’t even have pants. “Now I got Chrome Hearts jeans / Amiri jeans / What the fuck I got on now? It cost 23,” he shrugs, still unable to identify his new threads. When he’s done, the room is all smiles, except for Rio, who calmly studies the footage to make sure he’s satisfied.

Fast forward three hours — we’d schlepped into Jersey so Rio could appear on a Twitch stream with Zoe Spencer, and now we’re fighting through traffic en route to the venue. Rio’s publicist has tracked down a braider who beats us to Webster Hall, but by the time we pull up, it’s clear there won’t be enough time for a retwist; Rio tells her to stick around and they’ll handle things after the show.

Rio has been remarkably put together all day, but now, it seems as though the marathon is beginning to catch up with him. His movements are a little more languid, sloppy as the backend arrives in a manila envelope and is stuffed into his black leather LV backpack; a short while later, he emerges from the green room bathroom and announces the $500 bottle of Bond No. 9 cologne he’d purchased less than 8 hours ago had slipped from his wet grasp and shattered on the floor. The green room is getting packed, but Rio seems distant, not distracted. It’s hard to tell if he’s thinking about the impending show or nothing at all.

Earlier, at On The Radar, Rio had rapped, “I fell asleep on stage, I don’t take bars,” an acknowledgement of sloppy tour dates this summer where he’d been semi-somnambulent, stumbling through tracks like a drunk at karaoke. But on stage at Webster Hall, the energy never flags. Backed by YN Jay and RMC Mike, he mostly performs material from his most recent mixtape F.L.I.N.T. (Feeling Like I’m Not Through), plus a judicious selection of early hits. The crowd enthusiastically raps along to newer tracks like “4 Minutes of Hell,” “I GO,” and “RIO FREE,” but the biggest pop of the night has to be for Rio and Mike’s “Paranoid,” specifically the line, “had a threesome with two fat hoes I need a different bed!” After an hour, he closes things out with “Legendary,” letting the crowd rap most of the words for him.

 

With the concert handled, things start to move faster. First, there’s some old school fan engagement — a paid meet and greet, where Rio flicks up with a dozen and a half diehards. Then we’re back in the car, still in a rush. Rio’s set to record at EMPIRE’s Midtown studio later tonight, but before we head over, we have to make a significant detour for a cross-generational collab: promoting Styles P’s Upper Manhattan dispensary.

As Rio recommends his followers tap in with the brand, I’m struck by the absurdity of driving 40 minutes each way to film a 40 second Reel, till I consider how many tens of thousands of times the clip will be watched. Instagram was well-established by the time Rio started his sentence, but it’s since become the nucleus of global advertising, hyper-targeted and ubiquitous — 40 seconds can move units, and Rio is a consummate salesman, fluidly adapting to the ever-increasing speed of our terminally online culture.

We finally arrive at EMPIRE Studios around 1 AM. The braider is here, and Rio disappears to wash his hair. I’m watching another artist slowly but steadily hammer out a verse as RMC Mike lights up a cig indoors. I’ve spent all of 14 hours on Rio’s schedule and I’m fighting to stay alert. Rio seems to be in a similar boat, dozing in a chair as his hair is worked over — but when it’s time to go in the booth, around 2:30 or so, he seems perfectly poised, laying down his bars in a quarter of the time his collaborator had taken (Perhaps he had been dreaming in meter).

Earlier in the summer, Rio told me he fantasized about recording a new track on stage every night of tour. He’s pretty sure it would be easy enough to set up a laptop and mic and demand the crowd get quiet for 10 minutes so everyone across the country could witness the recording process for themselves, raw and unfiltered. At the start of our interview, Rio said the biggest adjustment post-prison has been all the love people have been showing him since his release, and he wants to reciprocate. The deluge of new music isn’t enough. Long nights on the road, weeks away from his kids, fragmented glimpses of his half-buried trauma — what else could Rio hope to give fans on tour?

“We was thinking about giving them me.”