A
t first, the weather at Brooklyn’s Prospect Park is sunny, verging on warm, but in typical Spring fashion, clouds bring it back into windy and chilly territory. 26-year-old rapper Niontay is unfazed. When we meet, the laid-back MC is content to go with the flow. Though he’s been in New York City for six years now, the city hasn’t chipped away at his Southern charm. As we’re getting acquainted, leisurely searching for an undisturbed space in the park to talk, a woman on a bench asks him if he’s from Florida. Knowing his wicks gave him away, he replies in the affirmative.
Niontay recently released “Mr.HaveMyWay,” an ethereal track that he says represents “how he’s coming” on his debut album Fada<3of$ (a play on “For The Love of Money”), out this Friday. He hopes the 19-song project will serve as a catalyst for prosperity for him and his family. “I’m going to make sure my people good,” he says. “My great great great grandchildren going to know about my name, they going to know about what their ancestor did and why they able to live how they live. [I will be] somebody who opened doors not just for people around my way, but anybody I love.”
Niontay was born Niontay Hicks in Milwaukee, and later moved to Central Florida as a child. He first started writing songs while stuck at home, on punishment from his mother. After growing tired of reading her copy of The Autobiography of Malcolm X, his attention shifted to writing poetry, which eventually turned into writing rhymes. Rapping became a more serious pursuit for him in high school, as he began recording with friends and then on his own after his mother bought him a computer. But even as he honed his craft, writing all the time while being inspired by the likes of Kendrick Lamar and Big KRIT, he didn’t have the funds to take his art to the next level. He eventually drifted away from his passion, making money through hustles that included selling Jordans. “It was a lot going on,” he recalls.
After graduating from high school, he went to Queens on a whim and met someone who offered him a modeling gig and a place to stay. He recalls doing “a few little cool gigs” during his time modeling, but was mostly thankful to be getting paid. “This modeling shit something from God. I don’t know where this shit just came from,” he marvels. “They talking about this much money…I’m finna run it up off this, and I’ll worry about rap when it come back…If it’s supposed to be, it’s going to come back to me.”
The bug caught him in Harlem, when he got drunk and jumped into a cipher at a riverside BBQ he and some friends were hosting. After impressing the partygoers, he recorded several songs in an Airbnb they rented; his de facto engineer told him he was talented and should take rap seriously again. They made “four or five” more songs during that period.
While in New York, he met the prolific New York rapper MIKE through the rapper Sideshow, the first new friend he made in the city. “Since that week, I probably kicked it with MIKE damn near every day for a year straight. We ended up going on tour later that year, the first tour I ever been on.” And soon after building his initial buzz, he signed with MIKE’s label, 10K Global. He contends that the Brooklyn-based movement runs deeper than a label. “You know niggas got to slap a name on something so that they could process it,” he jokes. “But we’re just a group of close homies who, even before we started making music together, were just friends. My brothers and my sisters.“
In 2023, he dropped Dontay’s Inferno, an introductory mixtape containing two of his career’s most consequential songs: “Aint Shit” and “Thank Allah.” He says the former was the first that made him feel like he’d found his voice. Deciding what kind of beats he wanted to rap over was initially a challenge for him, but after he made “Ain’t Shit’s” breezy, minimalist beat with the rapper 454, he realized “this me right here.” Similarly, the excitement surrounding “Thank Allah,” a pensive, surging stream-of-consciousness track, showed him that he he had a real audience. “Niggas is listening. When I drop, niggas is going to pay attention in some way, which I’m grateful.”
The independent label has given him the freedom to work at his own pace on Fada<3of$, which he began ideating “about two years ago.” “I had [an album] in the back of my mind, but I needed to go through like a thousand writer blocks, a bunch of life shit,” he says. A summer 2024 trip to London reinvigorated his creativity, as he got inspired by the scene, his peers, and began cranking out tracks at Miloco Studio. “I got in one of them bags where I was just making shit, not even thinking about it,” he says. He thought the flood of creativity was the catalyst for “album mode” that would continue in the States, but then he realized he had already recorded around 60 songs. “I was smoking, listening to all the music I got, figuring out the order, like, ‘Nah, this the album right here, bro, you got every vibe you looking for,’” he recalls.
Fada<3of$ is a varied convergence of Niontay’s boundless sonic curiosities. “I like so much different type of music,” he says. “So many different bags, genres, so when it come to me making it, you going to fuck around and get a Drum & Bass break for 20 seconds at the end of one song, and then the next song will be something totally different. It’s going to happen regardless…I’m not trying to like, ‘show you my range.’”
Over “Old Kent Road Freestyle’s” bass riff and searing synth, he offers the tao of the Niontay experience, rhyming, “Nigga I’m on my fuckin thirteenth flow of the song / I don’t need a hook or a bridge the fuck is those.” On the funkily-titled “GMAN balaclava(like09)” he’s rapping over a Louisiana-flavored beat, while he playfully croons to the woman of his desire on “So Lovely’s” sentimental keys.
“Mumbleman” is a satirical track where he turns into an eponymous alter-ego over a mellow instrumental and rhymes, “They told me speak up well I done’ slept walked to a bag off mumbling nigga,” softly whispering the second half of the line. He paired the track with a video featuring karaoke-style lyrics on screen, including question marks at times to needle critiques of his delivery. He tells me that he saw a response to the track on YouTube that proved his point. “The first five seconds is him like, ‘Bro, I do not know what this nigga saying,’” he reflects.” I’m like, ‘Nigga, I got the lyrics on the video.’ That’s why I made that song, for niggas like that.”
When the term “mumble rap” first arose, it referred to the first wave of SoundCloud rappers who hip-hop purists chastised as agents of rap’s substantive decay. In their eyes, you couldn’t understand what these young rappers were saying, and they weren’t saying anything worthwhile anyway.
You can’t say that about Niontay.
On “Triggaman,” he raps, “Niggas only came pro-Black, cause pro-Black got ‘em paid.” When I asked him about the bar, he said it was primarily about rappers whose actions contradict their pro-Black messaging. “I’m upset at the niggas acting like they one way in they music, holier than thou about this whole Black power shit we got going on, but then I get around you in real life and it’s like, ‘G, what the fuck? That’s not what it is,” he says. “You know how we say, ‘Niggas is profiting off Black trauma?’ In a sense, that’s what that is: You can’t use this as your bread and butter, but you’re not a good character within the community.” I heard his line loud and clear, and it turned into an extended exchange on hypocrites and grifters — that’s what good art does.
Niontay says he was also intentional about “building a universe” on Fada<3of$ through his alter egos. There’s Mumbleman, but on “Stuntin like my baba,” he rhymes as “Lil Peanut Butter” in a high-pitched voice. He says the approach comes from appreciating MF DOOM’s Metal Fingers and JJ Doom aliases, as well as advice he got from his friend and label head. “Mike tells me all the time, ‘Bruh, it’s about creating a world.’ And that’s what that shit do for you,” he says. “It’s these different characters for different parts of it.”
Another one of his alter egos is Sex After Church, the moniker he uses for his work as a producer; he says that going forward, he will keep the distinction between Niontay the rapper and Sex After Church the producer. And outside of music, Niontay reveals he has plenty of “side quests” he wants to explore. “I really want to get into making little filmmaking,” he says. “But not necessarily making a whole two-hour film, just putting together little 15-minute shits for YouTube. I want to make a cartoon. I want to act, for real. I’m putting that shit out here.” And with his track record, the thespian pivot will come to him.
