After a surge in popularity, the underground rap star retreated from the spotlight. His new project FunHouse Deluxe brings back his addictive, hypercolor sound.
prettifun barely enjoyed blowing up. His August and October 2024 mixtapes Pretti and FunHouse pushed his heartfelt rage raps and chipper, upbeat sound in front of an unprecedentedly wider audience, but the attention was debilitating. “People was looking at me all types of different ways, talking about me all types of different ways,” he tells me on a video call. “I wasn’t talking to nobody, I wasn’t answering no calls. I couldn’t make no beats, I couldn’t even record.”
At least some of the burnout can be chalked up to his breakneck recording pace: the self-produced Pretti came together in just a week and a half. Capitalizing on his fast-rising profile, FunHouse enlisted several of the scene’s preeminent producers to burrow deeper into the young rapper’s euphoric, freewheeling sound. Riding high, prettifun teased that a third project was set to drop before the end of 2024. Then he went radio silent.
“It was a lot of stuff going on in my personal life. And how I made it past it was really just by perseverance,” prettifun says. “I literally had to be delusional with myself, literally telling myself, ‘there’s a reason for all of this shit that you’re going through right now.’
“And eventually, it does seem like there’s a reason for everything.”
Nearly 20 when we talk, prettifun has fond memories of life as a young music fanatic in Charlotte, even if he couldn’t afford concert tickets. Coming from serious musical stock – he says he’s “related to a lot of people from Parliament-Funkadelic” – he became an eager theater kid in middle school. His experiences with productions of Shrek and Hamilton proved valuable, even if anxiety relegated him to the background.
“I thought musical theater was some shit like Glee,” he laughs. “Once I got into it, it was still weird, but there was a lot of things I learned from it: singing and dancing at the same time, how to control my breath, knowing musical notes [or] how to structure a song.”
prettifun started making beats when he was 13, first on drum pads and then on DAWs, though he says he only got good at producing in the past couple years. Initially, his sound was a little closer to hyperpop or digicore, and then he discovered Pi’erre Bourne. You can hear that influence in the swooping melodic runs and sunshiney synth pads on prettifun’s beats, but also in his raps, from his plainspoken lyrics to the occasional boneheaded pun.
prettifun began rapping during quarantine at the urging of his friend ezcodylee, who he met after inadvertently hitting on the rapper’s significant other at the time; the pair hashed it out on Instagram Live soon after. Fast forward a little, and “ez was like, ‘you need to start rapping’ […] the first song I ever made, I have with him,” prettifun recounts.
Typical for the times, prettifun met most of his collaborators online, including the now-defunct collective 4ersona, whose loose ranks included skaiwater, Rich Amiri and che at various points. prettifun says the group helped him learn more about “what to drop” and “how to have good friends,” though he isn’t exactly wistful.
“It feels like a distant ass memory, like that shit never really happened,” he says. “It was just a bunch of kids sitting on the computer all day, making music, sending beats to each other and looking at Reels.”
“First half of 2024, I was still in school because I had gotten held back a grade the year before off some bullshit, [and I ] didn’t really know what the fuck I was doing in my career,” prettifun explains of the past 18 months. “But that was around the time I was working with che on “miley cyrus,” and then we had talked about Sayso Says in general, helping him with some sounds.”
You can trace an essentially straight line from 4ersona to “miley cyrus,” the prettifun-produced March 2024 single that crystallized the neon-hued wall-of-sound approach che deployed with dizzying aplomb on last fall’s Sayso Says. Although that song, and the subsequent, even more successful “Pizza Time,” didn’t make the album’s final tracklist, their maximalist juxtaposition of sprightly melodies and thought-stopping bass pushed che to some of his strongest vocal performances to-date. But the behind-the-boards success didn’t quite translate into stability for prettifun.
“Fast forward, “miley cyrus” drops, I’m still working at Food Lion, because being a producer, when you start out and you just getting placements, shit really not paying you too much. That’s the real side of the industry. Fast forward to ‘Pizza Time:’ that drops, I quit everything. And that was when I started focusing more on my own music.”
The buoyant toplines and burbling 808s on the self-produced Pretti scaled up the melodic undercurrent in prettifun’s music, garnering a fervent community of fans who couldn’t get enough of his cheery sing-raps. Initially intended as a deluxe, followup FunHouse called on a bevy of producers (including Ginseng, Iankon, gyro and legion), freeing up prettifun to focus more closely on his flows.
“The beats I was looking for [on that project] were very synth heavy, bright, wide, colorful ass beats,” prettifun says. “I wanted to overload the senses.”
Out now, FunHouse Deluxe attempts to unpack the past 10 months in 15 songs, rifling through designer clothing and striving to make his family proud. His hooks can be ecstatic (“Kisses”), uncertain (“Sides”), or ripe with grief (“Last Wish”); “Internet” is a “very angry song” about “a girl being so internet she doesn’t know how to handle a basic interaction with you;” he sounds less passionate flexing that $2,000 means nothing to him now (“Different”) than he does confessing he was still broke after blowing up (“Infinity”). Despite the wide range of sentiment, these songs feel unified by their candor, a Technicolor inner monologue unspooling in real time.
“That was one thing I really wanted to focus on,” prettifun says. “With Pretti and FunHouse, I was trying to connect songs more through how they sounded. And with FunHouse Deluxe, I’m connecting these songs through context. So I’m talking about things that match up with the last song or the whole album, but things might not always sound the same, and that’s where a lot of the emotional depth comes from.”
The first song prettifun recorded for the album was “idk wtf,” but he “really got back into the music bag for this year” when he recorded “Fuck W Ya.”
“I was angry when I made it,” he says. With music, you need to have some sort of ego when you’re in entertainment, but a lot of the problem I’ve had with artists was just over shit that didn’t need to happen.”
“I think a lot of the things that people have against each other could be fixed by simple communication,” he shrugs. “Like I said [on “Sides”], n***as don’t really be beefing they just don’t talk.”
prettifun’s music has always been deeply sincere, but rarely this transparent. Being more vulnerable on wax hasn’t been easy, “but I knew that was never going to stop me,” he says. “The more personal you get with your art, the more beautiful it becomes.” By that measure, FunHouse Deluxe is prettifun’s most beautiful album yet, aiming for good karma and pure catharsis.
“Whether it’s a sad song or I’m talking about something that’s deep, by the time when I’m done, I’m making sure that you get the message: it’s going to be okay. It’s not just sad and then boom, song ends. There’s optimism to it, there’s hope in every song. You can do this shit, we can do this shit.”