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samaSon is a 21-year-old rapper from Goose Creek, South Carolina, who, alongside a small coterie of rising acts his age, is beginning to define the coming zeitgeist in modern hip-hop. His latest album, Jump Out, is a 45-minute trip into the blistering sonic universe of his generation. The record offers a cohesively chaotic vision for the future — razor-sharp synths set ablaze in digital audio workstations, drums modulated to frequencies at the edge of the ear’s functional limit, and lyrics like mantras punching straight through to one’s lizard brain. A product of rending emotional precision from the endless feed of information available everywhere all of the time.
Sacha Lecca for Rolling Stone
Sitting in the Rolling Stone offices in late January, OsamaSon, born Amari Deshawn Middleton, says he got the idea for the album’s title while in Madrid on vacation. “I was able to be sober, bro. I was able to really find myself and enjoy myself and look at what I got going on,” he says. “I felt like I was just jumping out, bro. That just explained my life at that moment.” The period of time coincided with a handful of setbacks. Hackers had recently broken into OsamaSon’s phone, leaking personal information as well as unreleased music. “I pushed through that shit, and I just jumped out to that shit,” he says.
At 18 tracks — with two more on the deluxe edition — Jump Out feels expansive without ever trudging into the realm of seeming overbearing. A sense of immediacy courses through the project, with each song clocking in at just over two minutes. Standout track “The Whole World is Free” lasts all of 82 seconds. The result is a robust overall runtime that nonetheless gives you a sense of lightness. “I don’t feel like a long album is necessary. You want people to just run it back,” OsamaSon says. “You should have that album where people can just run it back immediately. As soon as the last song ends.”
OsamaSon started making music in earnest around the start of the pandemic in 2020 (which, it bears mentioning, was five years ago). Still in high school and living at home with his parents, he’d rip beats off of YouTube and rap over them before hunting the producer down on Instagram to get their opinion on his creation. Fatefully, one got back to him. “He was like, ‘Yeah. Your shit is hard. But your mix is ass as fuck, bro. I’ll keep it 100,’” OsamaSon explains. “So I heard that, and I was like, ‘All right.’”
Equipped with new recording gear he got for Christmas that year, he started working on polishing his sound, uploading his work on YouTube, often to only a handful of listeners. “I was fighting to get 100 views on my shit,” he recalls. “I’m not even going to sit here and act like I was going crazy with the promotion and shit. I was sort of half-assing it, but still, though, I felt like my friends weren’t even listening to my shit.”
That started to change around 2023 when he dropped his breakout single “Cts-V,” which put OsamaSon on the map within the world of underground rap bubbling up on platforms like SoundCloud and YouTube. That summer, he’d drop his debut mixtape, Osama Season, which honed in on his distinct sound, building off the success of “Cts-V” with songs like “Kutta” and “Lil O,” which gained traction on TikTok. The project would ultimately get OsamaSon a deal with Atlantic Records, who released his second project, Flex Music, at the end of 2023.
Just before his music started to take off, OsamaSon connected with the producer Wegonbeok — also known as OK — another young musician at the forefront of the next generation’s sound. “From our first conversation, we’ve always wanted to build a sound that’s not biting off of some other shit, you feel me? It’s really just me and him,” OsamaSon explains. “So when we first started locking in, it was just some come-up shit. We were both working with different people. We were both just trying to find that come-up. I feel like after I made my little come up and after he built a name for himself and shit, it came to the point where we’re like, ‘All right.’ It was just perfect timing.”
Sacha Lecca for Rolling Stone
Wegonbeok is known for his production work with artists in the underground rap scene online, notably Nettspend, another young musician defining the next vanguard of rap. OsamaSon says it is artists like himself, Nettspend, and Xaviersobased that speak most closely to young listeners. “The youth really fuck with us the most, bro. When it comes to the specific beats we’ve been using, a lot of that shit we’ve been on, it’s starting to get popping. But we’ve been on that.”
Where the brash, explosive production style present in these younger artists’ work might sound jarring for older listeners — think of the blown-out bliss of XXXTentacion’s “Look at Me” arriving in 2015 — it’s a defining theme of the music being made by younger members of Gen Z and, increasingly, Gen Alpha. “I feel like we all kind of went through the same shit with us being kids going through COVID and shit, just having to go through that cultural shift from 2020 to now,” OsamaSon explains. “I feel like that’s why a lot of the rap game is getting even younger and younger.”
OK produced the bulk of Jump Out, and the pair succeeded in crafting a sound that, while sonically linked to the forbearers of the underground — maximalist drums in the spirit of so-called “rage” rap along with melodic flourishes of early Playboi Carti — the Charlotte, North Carolina born producer manages to tread new terrain, constructing a sonic identity that feels deliriously right now. Tracks like “Waffle House” have the moody sensibility of a video game soundtrack, except awash in drums that gargle subterraneously. OsamaSon’s flow glides into place, bringing the clash of sounds a sense of coherence with a playful and earnest sort of songcraft. “I feel like I came a little different on [Jump Out], but I still added old elements of my old swag to make some new shit,” he says. “And OK, he’s just always trying to figure something new out. I remember he took me to a Snow Strippers show one time, and that shit completely changed my outlook on everything. I was like, ‘Yo, we might got to start making beats like this, bro!’”
Sacha Lecca for Rolling Stone
OsamaSon’s fans, a cohort of his generation of digital natives, mingle in online spaces like Discord servers and Twitch streams. As he started gaining traction, eager young listeners would begin leaking unreleased music, finding snippets from OsamaSon’s wide array of online collaborators and compiling fragments of unfinished work before sharing them on various platforms online. “We got different apps like TikTok and a whole bunch of other shit. Everything’s advanced more now, so you can see it a lot more now,” OsamaSon says. “You really see the stans. The stans are really being stans online now.”
Jump Out was initially scheduled to be released on Valentine’s Day, but fans online were able to leak the project several weeks ahead of time, effectively forcing OsamaSon’s hand to drop the album earlier. “We expected that shit since December, bruh, when they were trying to leak my lead singles to this shit. So we kind of knew that they wanted it that bad and that they would end up leaking it anyway,” he explains. “So, since December, I feel like we’ve just been working super hard on trying to finish that shit to be prepared for that exact moment right there. We were ready for it. We already had all the songs mixed and mastered.”
Sacha Lecca for Rolling Stone
That isn’t to say OsamaSon wasn’t disappointed that he didn’t get to execute his rollout on his own terms. “If they would’ve waited a little bit, I feel like it would’ve been a little bit more special because I did have some more shit that I wanted to do. I wanted to get super active, bro. I really wanted to show them, all right, this trailer, this trailer, this trailer,” he says. “I kind of feel like with that, it just fucked my whole mood up. It was like, ‘Come on, bro. Why would you do that?’ Then the people who do it, they swear they know so much, but they know so little.”
Still, he’s grateful for his audience and says he draws inspiration from them at his live shows. At its best, their devotion creates something symbiotic — a real-life sounding board for his ideas. “Performing helps a lot in my songwriting because it gives me an idea of how certain fans react to how I rap,” he says. “Say I’m rapping super fast. The fans can’t keep up with that. They’re not too active in it in the shows. I’m in the studio, I’m like, ‘Hmm, I see the response I get when I rap like this. I see the response I get when I rap like this. I see the response I get when the song is this long. I see the response I get when the beat comes in like this.’ So it’s like I study all that shit, and that’s all that’s going through my mind as I’m making a song. Not going to lie.”
And one thing fans can’t leak is the live experience, which OsamaSon says is going to be “some insane shit.”
“I’m trying to make sure my presence is just super insane. I want to make sure everybody can see me on the stage, everybody can hear me, and all my lights are on point,” he says. “I want you to step into the venue, and it’s automatically that atmosphere like, ‘Ah. This shit about to be different. We in Jump Out world now. This is where we at. And we ain’t nowhere else except here.’”
