Where Are They Now?
Baby Keem
What else can I say here other than that Baby Keem blew up. His debut album The Melodic Blue dropped this year and for those first two weeks every time someone was on aux, they’d play a song off of it. Let’s not even get started with the viral meme of “Top of the Morning,” that line was used on almost every Instagram caption I saw and repeated constantly throughout the day to the point it got annoying. With heavyweight features on this album such as Travis, Brent Faiyez, Don Toliver, and Kendrick twice, it’s hard to ignore Keem’s meteoric rise to stardom and the pull he has in the industry relatively early in his career. His album highlighted his strengths with his adaptability to switch between melodies and hard-hitting trap verses and boasted pretty good critic reviews and is a great entry point for a mainstream audience. When we last wrote about Keem, his biggest song was Orange Soda which had 9.1 million views on Youtube and 20.2 million plays on SoundCloud. Keem also only had a modest has 152 thousand followers on Instagram. Now his biggest song is Family Ties with 35 million views on Youtube and 149.7 million plays on Spotify. He now also has 796k followers on Instagram and a whopping 13.9 million monthly listeners on Spotify. So far Keem has exceeded standards and I can’t wait to see what he does next.
TheHxliday
TheHxliday is slowly creeping into people’s playlists and doing a solid job of staying busy since the last time we wrote about him. In late 2020 he appeared on the Internet Money album B4 The Storm holding down his own song Familiar and featuring alongside Ty Fontaine on Let You Down. He also appeared on DJ Schemes album Family with a song named Falling 4 U. Cleary TheHxliday is surrounding himself with big names and talents and is in good hands. It’s only a matter of time before he breaks through. He released his double-sided EP, The Most Beautiful Disaster showcasing yet again where he draws heavy influence from with many different genres seeping in through the production and songwriting. He also secured a feature from Polo G which was huge, and the song Wit Dat which has amassed 3.6 million streams on Spotify. TheHxliday now has 317k followers on Instagram and 424,182 monthly listeners. It’s going to be a fun ride seeing TheHxliday grow into this genre mix and cement himself.
Guwop Reign
Guwop Reign is still keeping it lowkey but dropping bangers since the last time we left off on him. He appeared on Lil Tecca’s album Virgo’s World in late 2020 which was huge in bringing more awareness to him. He’s only dropped about 5 songs since our last article on him but continues to impress and develop his style and craft. Mulan 2 now has 1.3 million plays on Spotify and he’s garnered 28k monthly listeners as well. By the last article’s publishing date he had 18.1k followers on Instagram but now has 26.8k. We’re still waiting on a project and we’re very excited about it as we are sure it will impress and propel him forward into a strong career.