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Wahid x ILLUMINATED!

Rising Florida rapper Wahid shares his new single “ILLUMINATED”, taken from his upcoming EP THEY ALL GO MAD!. Following his recent EP feast, by ravens, THEY ALL GO MAD! continues with Wahid’s gift in merging classic MC traditions with forward-thinking cadences and melodies. In his double-time acrobatic flows, he’s distinctly post-Kendrick Lamar, and Lil Wayne – blessed with a novelist’s eye for minor detail and a virtuoso’s gift for ransacking hidden pockets of a beat. He can turn a warped post-Dilla instrumental to ashes with 16 bars and croon a plaintive falsetto wail on the hook that wouldn’t sound out of place on a Jeremih album.

Speaking on his new single "ILLUMINATED!," Wahid shares, "This song probably has my favorite hook on the entire project. I loved how my producer Vitamn approached/wrote it. This song is just fun to me. It’s also piercing, lyrically. The verse I wrote on this was the first ‘I’m about to prove a point’ moment for this project. And that point is… no one can really f**k with me.”

Nothing was a given in Orlando, Florida, a city best culturally known for its theme parks and boy bands. Wahid had lived here since the age of five, when his parents relocated the family from the Bronx. Throughout his childhood and adolescence, there were no real local role models for success. He and his best friend would try to find open mics and shows, but they were few and far between. It wasn’t until Wahid attended Florida A&M in Tallahassee when he became fully immersed in a flourishing hip-hop community. And by the time he returned home in the middle years of the last decade, Orlando had finally incubated a diverse scene that encompassed rap, folk, electronic music and indie-slanting guitar rock.

Earlier this year saw the release of his EP, feast, by ravens, which saw him garner praise from Dazed’s Only Tracks You Need To Hear, COLORSxSTUDIOS, CLASH Magazine’s Astral Realm and landed him in Complex-Pigeons and Planes’ highly respected Best New Artists feature for their October edition.

Wahid x WILT/CORNERSTONE

Second-generation Jamaican, Floridian rapper Wahid has today shared his debut two-track EP “WILT/CORNERSTONE.”

Feeling carefree, Wahid shares this on the two tracks, “‘WILT’ is a record conceived after I drank a cheap bottle of Stroysky liquor in the studio with Kaelin and Iggy. I wanted to emulate carefree vibes on Isaiah Rashad’s ‘House is Burning’ album. With a lot of Damian Marley playing through the studio speakers, ‘CORNERSTONE’ is a direct inspiration from a song his father wrote (Bob Marley’s Cornerstone; 1970), which is one of my all time favorite songs. Meek shall inherit the earth, last shall be first.”

Through Wahid’s sonic storytelling he refuses to submit to negativity and fatalism. His hip-hop collective had just wrapped their first national tour. Their DMs were flooded with A&Rs offering deals and producers looking to collaborate. One major label president – who had signed some of the biggest artists of the last quarter-century – told them that they were on the path to becoming global superstars. Then the group split up. It was over before it even began.

The ensuing depression was all-consuming. There were days where Wahid didn’t budge from bed, drawing the blinds closed, and numbing the wounds with bottle after bottle of liquor. Despite his best efforts to salvage the wreckage, none of his attempts yielded anything positive. But through the duress, he discovered his inner resilience and perseverance. Stay tuned for more music from Wahid.