“Everyone is worried about boys your age…should we be?" I ask Nettspend, newly 19 and folded into the couch beside me. He doesn't answer right away, instead taking a moment to exhale a slow-blooming cumulonimbus that briefly softens the room.

It's kind of funny then...For someone who appears to be living the American Dream, leaving a small suburb outside of Richmond to pursue music in the city, one wonders if he's dreaming at all, what with the copious amounts of smoke blurring the edges of his reverie. But perhaps it's something deeper, some kind of untying from the need to dream in the first place. What happens when everything you've been told to want is already within reach? What is there left to imagine?

But I have it all wrong.

Nettspend shakes his two-toned head, gently correcting me. "I'm still dreaming," he says, "For sure."

For the rapper, even now, even here, there's still a trace of longing to "still [try] to be a lot of things." It appears that from up there, Nettspend still isn't immune to earthly desire or that subtle, constant, aching buzz of ennui.

Don't worry, though, you don't have to sit with that feeling for too long. His music doesn't let you. Cutting straight through the dull hum of the everyday, Nettspend transmutes that lowgrade tedium into something narcotized and all-consuming. For the uninitiated, a warning akin to those for strobe lights might be in order. It's every noise all at once, stimulating and yet sedating, creating a sensory ketosis that crackles and fizzes with a synthetic sweetness like Pop Rocks in your brain. His cadence carries the restlessness and relentless energy of youth with quick, jagged, unpredictable (sometimes illegible) sentiments, slipping between playful inflections and sharp, urgent quips.

In the three and a half years since his debut, Nettspend has earned nods from figures like Ye, Frank Ocean, Playboi Carti, Cole Bennett (Lyrical Lemonade), Lil Yachty, Bladee, and Drake. This year he walked in Demna's debut collection for Gucci, and HBO has allegedly bought the rights to his first mixtape's documentary. He's amassed over two million monthly listeners on Spotify, surpassing 382 million streams, and will soon start his two-month North American tour and return to Rolling Loud California for the third time. "[There's] something new every day. I wake up, and I'm like, 'Fuck, like, what's gonna happen next?' You know?" He jokes, "I feel like what I would tell myself in the past [is] 'You getting hella money.'"

And, perhaps more important than all of these accolades combined, Nettspend is something of a deity to American adolescents. When I think of Nettspend, a particular viral video from this year's New York Fashion Week comes to mind: snow falling on a crowded Manhattan street, hundreds of iPhone flashes illuminating a car crawling forward inch by inch, trying to clear a crowd crush. From the sunroof emerges a nonchalant blonde angel, arms extended, parting a proverbial Red Sea. It is as if fans are witnessing a second coming: a messiah, maybe this generation's insolent Beatle. "I feel like when I see my fans, that makes me so happy," he says. "I give all my fans a hug. Everybody."

I meet Nettspend the day after his birthday, where he celebrated with "a big cake that said ELC." While one's teenage years are always formative, his recent string of rotations around the sun has sown a new breath into that youthful bravado. Music has been ambient since childhood for the young Gunner Shepardson—or at least since 5th grade when he started making songs on iPhone app, BandLab. Four years ago, Nettspend started uploading music to SoundCloud, and within a year, a snippet of his song "drankdrankdrank" went viral on X through grassroots chatter. By 16, he had already left home.

"You just kind of do it. You just have to do it and don't look back," he tells me. Now, Nett has made a home in LA. I ask him if he feels at home here, and he affirms: "I'm an Angeleno. I'm an Angelena!"

It is these impish turns of phrase, uttered while smirking, that indicate a self-possession far beyond Nettspend's years. He is very, very well aware, in his quiet way, that he is being surveilled by way of me, by way of everyone else in the room, but he still wants to play—as if daring us to correct him or ask him to elaborate. These dialectics—between the id, the ego, the observer—come through, too, in much of his oeuvre. Between 2023 and 2024 he released an avalanche of hit tracks: "2024 Freestyle" (a delectable wave of avant-garde post-post rage), "otw" (feat. xaviersobased), "F*CK SWAG" (powered by heavily rounded swaggy 808 basslines), "40" with Surf Gang leader evilgiane (a tightly packed 64-second punch), and "nothing like uuu," where he sings, "hold my hand if you think it's for life," (Nettspend is, clearly, a romantic after all). Later that year, he released his debut mixtape, Bad Ass F*cking Kid, via Interscope Records. There's a jerk to the rhythm of the record, a spasm of neo-rage sewn under cloud rap tropes, but beneath that volatile surface is an almost airless intimacy. He is, unmistakably, a child of the internet raised in the afterglow of the SoundCloud era, and now turning anew.

It is not hard to forget that Nettspend is young. It's there in the titles, in the posture, in his song "Skipping Class," when he shrugs off responsibility with the line, "Fuck them grades." The signal is loud—almost excessively so, and interrogates one's threshold for fried-dom. What lingers, though, is how quickly that fact gets flattened into the headline, recycled until it becomes an explanation instead of context. But isn't that why we like it, why we talk about the music? For those who came before him, Nettspend offers a way back into the simulation of teenage volatility, of bad decisions that felt profound at the time. To younger listeners, Nettspend's music can be quite therapeutic—like a rage room. There's a sense of autonomy taking shape here—even if that autonomy is "I'm walkin' 'round, lean cup spillin' shit." It's a sign of life (in progress, but life nonetheless), no matter how messy, unfiltered, and unresolved.

In his popular 2023 track, "shine n peace," he sings, "I'm looking at the sky, thinking 'bout how high it go." It's a disarmingly simple line. And sometimes, through all the discourse and Reddit threads and noise, it's easy to lose sight of what's actually happening. Because there's this ubiquitous moment, somewhere in the process of coming of age, when you realize the world is expanding faster than you can even make sense of it. Sylvia Plath wrote about it with the fig tree; William Blake with a grain of sand; Virginia Woolf with The Waves. It's a reminder that those who came before have felt it. I have felt it, Nettspend feels it, and countless others will keep feeling it long after. "I didn't know too much about how big it could get," he tells me of his output and ascent. "I just knew that it wasn't this far-fetched, you know?" And maybe that's the real meaning, youth not as a spectacle but youth in active motion.

And while the interior is catching up, the outside continues to scale. After nearly nine months of delays (and leaks) and a steady swell of anticipation, Nettspend's debut studio album Early Life Crisis peaked at No. 39 on the Billboard 200 earlier this year, his highest charting project yet, eclipsing Bad Ass F*cking Kid. In it, his voice sprawls through contorted synths and serrated drums until it feels liquefied, slipping through blown-out 808s and glassy, high-pitched melodies that blur into a revered momentum. He collaborates with Baton Rouge's prolific rapper NBA YoungBoy on "masked up," reunites with the experimental dark-plug rapper OsamaSon in "pain talk," and samples Mike WiLL's "23" ft. Miley Cyrus, Wiz Khalifa, and Juicy Jay in his spring breaker rant: "shades on."

Where BAFK thrived on abrasion, ELC reveals itself as more deliberate in its disorientation. In the closing track "lil bieber," irony echoes between Nettspend and the early, intensely scrutinized career of JB, using their trajectories to explore the intersections of fame, youth, and the modern, internet-shaped "early life crisis." Time feels distorted across the record–sped up, stretched thin, and impossible to hold onto. How does Nettspend keep up with the demand? What keeps him moving, what steadies him inside all that acceleration?

"This is the only thing that I got," he tells me. "The music. So when I feel like I'm lacking in a sort of way, or I feel like, 'Oh, I need to do something different,' like it really does take over everything." For Nettspend, the music is the engine more than it is the product. And when the result becomes the purpose, is it possible to separate the self from the output, or does the work risk consuming the self entirely? He confesses, "It fucks with my mood a lot and fucks with how I see things sometimes." But at the end of the day, he says with a shrug, "I'm really happy that the fans love it. I'm happy that the people hate it too." Lovers and haters alike, it seems, exist only as background noise. "I got a lot going on in my head," he admits. "I just got to make the music."

Nettspend accepts the misconception as something inevitable, almost universal. "Do you feel misunderstood?" he flips it back at me, honestly awaiting my answer. He stands up now, walking in little circles, leaving a swirling trail of smoke. He admits, "I used to [be online] a lot, and it got kind of toxic, so I had to delete social media. I feel like everybody's a little misunderstood. Everybody can be misunderstanding and, you know, it's okay."

The Nettspend I see before me isn't shrouded by mystery or with the intention of being enigmatic. He holds eye contact, listens intently, and speaks openly—and is it any surprise, really, when he writes such unguarded honesty. He adds, "It's okay to be vulnerable too, that's when people can feel the most."

They say it's lonely at the top. Nettspend doesn't feel that way. "That's what's gonna get you further," he says, referring to the select people he keeps close, most of whom have known him since his childhood in Richmond. "But you have to do that yourself… [You] can't rely too much on anyone. As much as I want to say that, that you can, you really gotta be your own boss. You gotta boss up. You know? Boss up your life."

And, like any dutiful son, he always calls home. "I try to talk to [my mom and sisters] every day. I try to talk to them as much as I can." At the end of last year, he returned to Laurel Skatepark in Richmond to host his annual canned food drive and community skate event. The gathering was a chance for him to come back to a place that shaped him not only as someone who left, but as someone with the intention to give back.

"I guess what I really do is bring people together," he ruminates. "That all ties into the struggle and the love I have for everybody who is, or was, going through anything. I want to be here to help them in any way that I can. You've got to try to stay in a moment, but also worry about, you know, the bigger shit."

I take that as a challenge. Let's think big. "So, the meaning of life and ideas?"

"Shit." He takes another hazy pull. "Strip it from everything, and it's just crisis. You can have an early one, you can have a mid one, you can have a late one, but it's really just a crisis," he tells me. "It's our crisis. To live, to love, to struggle, to die."

"Worth it?" I ask.

"Worth it." (He tells me the next album is gonna be "happier").

If to live is to endure, what about what comes after? Does Nettspend believe in the afterlife, in heaven and hell? In good and bad? Where do we go when we are done enduring if it's so worth it? "I have this conversation with a lot of people," he confesses. "And I think everybody knows where they're gonna go, it's up to you."

So if it's up to Nettspend, and I had to take a guess, I can only really follow his projected slope. I would have to say probably somewhere up? Whatever he believes, I'll let him keep that to himself.

But yet, my question from before remains: Should we be worried? The cloud finally settles in the room, and all I can see is Nettspend. True and clear.

"Definitely be worried about us," he says. The pause is long and hard, but at the last second, he smiles, ever so slightly. "But we're gonna be okay."

Creative Direction: Phoenix Guerrero

Photographed by Cian Moore and Calvin King

Styled by Christopher Campbell

Written by Bree Castillo

Production Company: Clovermode Productions, Inc.

Producer:  Kamden Kodimer

Production Designer: Oisín Moore

Grooming: Logan Wiggins

Gaffer: Chris Morgan

Camera Assistant: Kaleb Gould

Styling Assistant: Lumani Junior and Sophie Saunders