The FADER caught up with the New Detroit rapper to discuss going to art school, Neon Genesis Evangelion, and recording his debut album.
Lelo raps as though he’s allergic to writer’s block, his incisive, enunciated bars pinched and poised no matter the instrumental. But that doesn’t mean recording his debut album New Detroit was carefree.
“I was fighting myself with a lot of songs on this album, to be real,” Lelo says on a mid-July phone call a week ahead of the album drop. “It’s never that I don’t have anything to say. It’s more so, I don’t like this enough to keep going.”
Accordingly, every line on New Detroit is carefully chiseled out, from barely-satisfied victory laps (“Soldier”) to his hushed stunt raps – “I aint trust a bitch since Obama administration,” he grins on “Call It.” Lelo’s flow is undeniably Detroit (he’s worked with Babyface Ray, though his raps more readily recall Veeze), but also draw on inspirations that include Earl Sweatshirt, André 3000, and Pro Era.
So interwoven between the flexes are streaks of unhappiness, whether grieving his cousin (“Chirp”) or somberly reflecting on the path he’s taken to his current niche (“Survivor’s Guilt”). From the cyclical struggle of “Groundhog Day” to the oblique emotions hinted at on “AM,” where Lelo sighs, “My expression showing hints I can’t relate in no verse,” New Detroit imbues simple hobbies (getting fly, running up a check) with unexpected pathos.
Although it’s his first official album, New Detroit is the culmination of years of SoundCloud loosies, mixtapes, and EPs. His knack for hermetic raps was already apparent on early songs like “kapital” or “Demeulemester,” but his run of singles over 2024 and 2025 found Lelo fully hitting his stride, racking up millions of plays on fan favorites “No Contempt” and “Limbless” for their cutting wordplay and sticky cadences.
“It’s so much less performative now,” Lelo explains, saying he used to try too hard to sound different from his peers. “Nowadays I really get on the mic and just say exactly what comes naturally.”
Crucially, his ear for beats encompasses everything from the insistent rhythms of his hometown to the ambient textures and melodic synths that define various strains of Internet-grown hip-hop, sewn together by go-to producers CDub, Shogun, 4amjuno, and more. Whatever the backdrop, Lelo’s nimble raps always turn around a slightly unexpected bar (“this shit backwards like a manga page;” “I get money til my cup runneth over”), his metaphors crisp and distinct. Surprisingly, some of his more polished spring singles didn’t make the cut for inclusion on the album, a mark of how strict Lelo can be with his vision. And as breezy as the raps might be, their tightly wound rhymes give away the sheer effort of the 25-year-old’s recording process, honed during a stint in art school.
The education brought his creative process into focus, although he wasn’t totally certain about pursuing music at the time.“I really just took that time to figure out whether I really wanted it. So I would go in there, and I’d be painting all the time, be tired, like fuck it. Come home or come to my dorm, record whatever I could, and repeat.
“I had a painting instructor who was really big on teaching people how to become an artist and what it means to be an artist and how shit ain’t all happy. It’s not all rainbows. You going to make a million things you hate, you going to make things you love. Sometimes it take a minute, sometimes it take 30 hours.”
This considered approach shines through on New Detroit. From the raps to the beats to the videos, Lelo and his collaborators diligently assemble the “conglomerate of new ideas” shaping his personal sound.
The FADER caught up with Lelo on July 15 to talk about the first rap song he made, his love for Evangelion, and the recording process for his debut album New Detroit.
The FADER: Back in the spring, your team sent me a sampler of the album that sounded pretty finished. Then it seemed like you went back to the drawing board for a second. I’m curious what the recording process has been like on your end.
Lelo: I’ve had album songs for years now and some of them stand the test of time as I’m aging with the music. The last few months it’s been important, being that the album is called New Detroit and that being the brand, that I just be home for a minute: Be with family, be with the people I’m around, be in the city. A lot of that has shaped the music cuz prior to that I’ve been traveling so much, bouncing around doing the music thing.
There are a few different cities with “New” scenes, i.e. New Dallas or New Chicago, but you use New Detroit as something more specific to yourself than a regional sound.
Yeah, absolutely. “New Detroit” is a branding. I forgot exactly how it was coined, but it was put on me for a second. And I felt it and I resonated with it, you feel me? From there, it’s become its own thing. I’m not really talking about a movement of everything new coming out of Detroit – it’s very much a thing that’s personal to me.
It’s more of an experience. When you think about the Renaissance era, you don’t define it by one thing. It’s a conglomerate of new ideas and new things coming out. And a lot of [New Detroit] really is where I fit in my environment and my atmosphere in music. It’s the place I’m carving out.
Thinking about New Detroit, when did you feel like you were really putting together the project as opposed to just recording.
I really record with a project in mind [because] I’ll be recording something and then I’m like, this will never work as a single. So I’m like, ‘it’ll have to be on an album or it’ll never make it.’ I feel like in a way I’ve always been working on it. Even though there might not be a song on here from two years ago when I had the idea, I’ve always been working on it.
And not only that… it’s a weird way to put it, but I don’t think me releasing it is the end of me working on it. I’m almost dropping this to start a story line. This album is Song 1 on the real album, which is four albums long. Which sound kind of crazy, but that’s how I think about it.
It’s funny to hear you talk about this idea of the project not being finished when it’s released because I know you’re a fan of Evangelion, which operates under a similar ethos.
100%. Literally bro, that’s my favorite type of everything. Being creative is one of the few fields where you can just be like, ‘n****, this is like this because this is where I want it to be right now.’ I make my own rules and that’s where I want to be at. Maybe there’s this many songs now, or I’ve seen artists change the cover art a couple years later. I love shit like that. Do whatever the fuck you want with your child.
One of my favorites on the project is “Paris.” I was wondering if you could tell me a little bit about recording that song.
Super, super, super natural. that’s some real fly Detroit shit. Some real house’d out ghettotech shit. Some shit my mama would have listened to in the club. And like I said my roommates [producers and close collaborators CDub & Shogun] are literally a ghettotech group [GroovePill].
So they float me a beat like, ‘alright bro, go rap on this.’ And it was one of the ones where I made it and I didn’t even think about it ever being on an album. They were telling me like, ‘Bro, you need to just put it on there, have it on there.’ Once I placed it, I fell in love with it even more.
One thing I find really impressive about your output, beyond the fact the songs are good and you’re dropping singles so regularly, is that you’re also doing a full presentation with your video treatments.
Bro, I appreciate that you said that cuz that was honestly something that I’ve been insecure about in a lot of ways. It’s been a lot of bouncing around and a lot of working with what we have rather than with an abundance, you know what I mean? Cuz a lot of times it just be like, a record works and like we pivot and make some shit fly happen out of it.
A lot of it is just trust. Me, my homies, my manager, just all trusting that we can make something fly. Regardless of how little we have, we can make something fly out of it. And that’s what a lot of these ended up being.
A lot of my videos, I sequenced them. I’m just looking at all the fucking clips and putting them how I feel like they should be. Same thing with Cdub, and I feel like that’s just how it all end up working. The slew of our influences and looking at what we got like, alright, how can we make this shit the coolest we can?