Inside Juice WRLD

SoundCloud sadness anthems made Juice WRLD a teen rap star, but he’s never felt better

SoundCloud sadness anthems made him a rap star, but now he’s feeling better than ever.

Let’s say you’re a newly famous teenager, with a single that’s on its way to being one of the year’s biggest and a reported seven-figure major-label advance in the bank, and you want to meet a girl. Where do you look? If you’re Juice WRLD, you go straight to your Twitter messages.

“She DM’d me telling me to keep up the good work and that she really liked my music,” the rapper, now 20, says of his girlfriend of almost a year. “It wasn’t flirtatious, it was just a congratulations. Then I don’t know what happened.”

Juice WRLD writes almost exclusively about adolescent heartbreak. He’s not worried, though, that his newfound romantic bliss will affect his writing. “I always put myself in a space to make whatever I want to make,” he says. “If I’m making a heartbreak song, it doesn’t necessarily have to be about me — I just know that’s something people are scared to talk about, and it’s something that I’m not scared to talk about.”

“Lucid Dreams,” which has been streamed more than 700 million times on Spotify, is the platonic ideal of Juice WRLD’s spurned-love pop — a dazed, warbled ode over stuttering drums and an unlikely Sting interpolation. He released it on SoundCloud first, before Interscope signed him and rereleased it last year, after which it became a radio mainstay; he went on to perform it at the VMAs, and Alicia Keys covered it at the Grammys. All of this was a surprise to Juice WRLD. “I had no way of knowing that ‘Lucid Dreams’ was going to blow up,” he says. “Some rappers, it takes five or six years to get noticed. Some of them don’t get noticed at all. I was one that got noticed right away.”

His rise — from making songs in his bedroom outside Chicago and uploading them to SoundCloud, to becoming a major-label star in a few months — brought some detrac

tors. Many online digs focused on the term “industry plant,” implying that record labels somehow conspired to make Juice WRLD a success. “These people don’t know the industry,” he says. “Half these motherfuckers don’t know how to spell ‘industry plant.’ ”

(If the labels knew how to bottle success, he adds, they would be doing it a lot more regularly than they are right now.)

Juice WRLD made his next album, Death Race for Love (out now), at a breakneck pace: He recorded most of it in 72 hours, sleeping at the Hollywood studio where he was working. “It’s not like a job,” he says. “It’s what I want to do, like a hobby.”

He promises a more wide-ranging sound on this project. “People say that they can hear the rock influence and the Blink-182 influence, the emo influence, in my music, but on this album you can hear ev-er-y-thing,” he says. “I have songs for the trap house, I’ve got songs for the sock hop, I’ve got songs for the Caribbeans, I’ve got songs for raves, I’ve got songs for slow dancing. I have a lot of different vibes on there.”

In February and March, he was on a European tour with Nicki Minaj, filling in for Future, the originally scheduled co-headliner. “I’m really looking forward to it — we’re going to be in Europe on a tour bus,” Juice WRLD said just before the tour. “And then at one part the bus is going to go on a boat.”

As his star continues to rise, Juice WRLD is trying to keep his head straight — he’s been sober for a few months (“It’s all about mind over matter,” he says), and he hopes to keep his creative process as instinctual as possible (hence the marathon album recording sessions for Death Race for Love).

“I take a second to stay focused, and I’ll recognize that I’ve done some great things, but I’ll leave it at that. I don’t sit down and think on anything.” He pauses. “Maybe if I’m making a business decision, I’ll talk it over with my attorney.”

“Some rappers, it takes five or six years to get noticed. Some of them don’t get noticed at all. I was one that got noticed right away.”