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I’m 32 years old, and I’m at the xaviersobased show. For many people, and for me most days, that might sound relatively young. But if you’re a fan of xaviersobased and his dissonant, very online brand of rap — and, I imagine, if you’re one of the kids in the mosh pit that I’m watching expand and contract below me from the balcony at Webster Hall — it probably sounds insanely old.

It’s the end of 2025, and the New York rapper is closing out his Riverside Tour with a sold-out concert in his hometown. Outside the venue, the 22-year-old’s boyish face stares back blankly from a decal on the side of a large tour bus parked on the curb; the design depicts Xavier and fellow rappers in his 1c collective, Backend and Ksuuvi, wearing black suits, carrying various instruments, and seemingly imitating the back cover of an Aventura album.

Inside, the packed room is full of baggy jeans and backpacks, face piercings and dyed hair. The stage around Xavier is set up to look like a skate park – ramps, traffic cones, a New York City park bench – and much of the crowd looks like they just wandered out of one. A kid clumsily surfs over the top of the crowd, recording the show from a laptop he’s holding over his head, and every few minutes, a group of mostly teenage boys in the middle of the crowd retreats to clear out a circle of empty floor as each song comes to an end, before charging forward as a new beat drops, bodies bouncing and arms flailing.

The songs that the crowd is reacting to are short and manic. There are jagged synth lines and airy piano melodies, rapid hand claps and distorted 808s. Xavier raps over samples of the Mac startup sound, black metal, and the background music from a series of online porn games called Meet N’ Fuck. His voice floats over this chaos, off-key and lilting. It tends to sound like he’s singing warped lullabies for iPad kids. Sometimes his lyrics are run-of-the-mill flexes, sometimes they’re hilariously whimsical, and sometimes he asks the real questions: “How you living life with no passion?”

At some point during Xavier’s set, his PR person appears and leads me through a labyrinth of cramped hallways and staircases to the side of the stage where fellow artists, friends, and family are gathered. I end up watching the rest of the show next to Xavier’s grandmother who, it occurs to me, is probably the oldest member of the audience. She has her phone turned sideways, following her grandson across the stage with its camera. While Xavier skips and grooves from one side of the room to the other, and the sea of kids in front of him lose their minds, I watch the whole thing through her phone screen.

A month after the show, on a frigid January night, I take a 90-minute Uber ride outside of the city to a sprawling strip mall on the side of a New Jersey highway. I’m meeting Xavier at Supercharged Entertainment, which is basically a Dave & Buster’s on steroids. The multi-level complex has an arcade, axe throwing, and — according to their website — the largest indoor go-karting track in the world. The location initially sounded like a slightly contrived PR idea but, after Xavier and a large crew of friends trickle in through the building’s metal detectors, I quickly realize this is exactly where he wants to be on a Friday night.

“Remember when we came here for your birthday?” DJ Rennessy, Xavier’s manager and close confidant, asks him. Xavier is wearing baggy grey sweatpants and a black Moncler down jacket with the hood pulled most of the way over his afro. His last two fingers on his right hand and his pinky finger on his left hand are both painted the same shade of royal blue. A teenager close to the entrance recognizes him and asks for a picture, which Xavier obliges. He tells me the last time he came to the largest indoor go-karting track in the world was two weeks ago.

I had spent the long drive out to New Jersey listening to Xavier’s major label debut album, Xavier. The project is his first full-length release in nearly two years, a rare quiet period in an otherwise noisy and prolific catalog over the last five years. In the time since his 2024 mixtapes Keep It Goin Xav and with 2, each project becoming his most cohesive work to date, he’s performed around the world, been embraced by some of his musical heroes, and signed a record deal.

When I tell Xavier that someone at his label, Atlantic Records, had sent me a watermarked stream of the album prior to its release for this story, he seems surprised. He slaps his hand down on the table and walks away. “It’s just I would have at least liked to know,” he says when I ask him about it a couple hours later. “I like to know what my music is doing.”

Another reason for his reaction could be that ever since he uploaded his first song to SoundCloud at the age of 13, Xavier has been doing just about everything himself when it comes to his music. He taught himself how to produce, how to record, how to maneuver in the vast online web of rap artists and collectives known simply as “the underground.”

He now finds himself in a unique position within this world; a growing cult fanbase sees him as a stylistic pioneer of several sounds that have proliferated upwards in recent years, and he appears to be on the brink of bigger stardom. Some of his peers and collaborators, like OsamaSon and Nettspend, have already ascended from the underground into more mainstream success, but Xavier’s music is much weirder and more interesting. Some of his appeal centers around the fact that he isn’t dressing up in Rick Owens and performing some mysterious rockstar-meets-vampire character — just to name one popular motif in this scene. From the outside looking in, his movement seems more wholesome than rebellious.

While we wait for our turn on the track, Xavier is already turning his attention to the Topgolf driving range across the parking lot. “It’s like every time I start to get it, it’s time to leave,” he says ruefully about his golf swing. “We gotta get nice at golf for the business meetings,” Rennessy chimes in.

This seems to be their dynamic: hyping each other with the energy of a weed-fueled brainstorming session where they actually follow through on their ideas, or at least enough of them.

We head up to the crowded bar, and Xavier peels off his layers to reveal a bright red shirt with Greg from the kids novel series Diary of a Wimpy Kid on the front. He orders a tequila sour, and turns to Backend who is unsuccessfully trying to get the bartender’s attention. “You gotta remember, this is Jersey,” he jokes. “You can’t do things out here the way you do in New York.”

Xavier was born in a post-9/11 New York City. He grew up in the Upper West Side near Riverside Park where his mother’s side of the family, who emigrated from the Dominican Republic, has lived for the last 40 years. “It's still at the ending stages of gentrification,” Xavier says of the neighborhood. “So it's a weird in-between.”

Growing up, he heard “a lot of Spanish music of all cultures” as well as house music from his ’80s and ’90s and used to make beats at home. It was his older brother Alex, who DJs and produces as Nurse, who first put Xavier onto skateboarding and blog-era rap like Odd Future and A$AP Rocky. The algorithm did its part as well; when Xavier was 10, he remembers clicking on Yung Lean’s 2013 music video for “Hurt,” which would be the beginning of his descent down the rabbit hole of internet rap: the absurd universe of Bay Area Lil B The BasedGod, Bladee and Drain Gang’s icy Nordic soundscapes, the occult-leaning Black Kray and Goth Money Records.

Around the same time, after seeing a YouTube video of producer Lex Luger making a beat, he downloaded a demo version of FL Studio and started making music of his own. His first upload on SoundCloud was a beat he made in 2016 at the age of 12. Xavier began rapping in high school, recording himself with the mic on his gaming headset. He adopted the name xaviersobased, taken from his old iCloud account and inspired by Lil B who first coined the term around 15 years ago as a guiding principle. “That word [based] is very important to me,” Xavier says. “It means effortless swag and positivity.”

When the pandemic began in 2020, Xavier had nothing but time and internet access. “I didn’t see concrete for six months,” he says. He traded out his gaming headset for a real microphone, and recruited the friends he connected with while playing Tony Hawk’s Underground: Pro to be a part of 1c34, a gaming clan turned music group that laid the foundation for his own musical world. “I started finding my voice a little bit,” he says. “I wasn't even close to fully finding it, but I was getting there. And that's all that mattered to me.”

His songs from that period, the ones that still remain up between his two SoundCloud accounts, sound like exactly what they are: the early experiments of someone still learning how they want to express themselves. Songs like “crisp dubs” feature multiple tempo changes within the span of a few minutes, a recurring trope in his music that he says was inspired by the late 2010s internet rap collective Reptilian Club Boyz. On tracks like 2020’s “adore,” his vocals are drenched in delay to the point of being indecipherable.

Not all of it works but the songs that do capture the distinct sort of magic that can happen when an artist is uninhibited by perception, or even their lack of technical knowledge, but is full of references and ideas. Xavier is more to the point: “I was just doing whatever the fuck — but that's what made them so fire.”

With motorcycle helmets and neck support collars on, we make our way toward a line of go-karts waiting in what looks like a miniature version of a NASCAR pit. Ignoring the racetrack employee giving out go-kart assignments, Xavier beelines for the #34 car, clearly fond of its coincidental reference to 1c34. When the light turns green, Xavier is the first out of the gate. I don’t see him on the track for the rest of the race.

One of Xavier’s biggest strengths as an artist is his ability to stay a few steps ahead of the rest of the internet. Over the last few years, he’s been responsible for helping to popularize a new era of jerk music — the swag rap sound that originally gripped the West Coast in the late-2000s and is now heard in many corners of SoundCloud and the U.K.’s underground — though he says he never really listened to the original wave of jerk and his percussion choices are more inspired by Milwaukee’s “lowend” party rap sound.

A big part of the way he’s operated from the beginning has been to collaborate early and often. He was already working with Milwaukee artists as the lowend scene began gaining traction online in 2022. And prior to the U.K. underground’s rapid rise, he and many of his go-to producers were already collaborating with Fakemink. This instinct, he says, comes from a place of genuine love for the music and the scene. “Me and the homies live and breathe this shit. I still definitely have that element in me of just searching for it.”

2022’s “patchmade” was Xavier’s first small taste of virality. The proto-jerk song is built around a tightly coiled loop of piano chords and drum kicks. Xavier raps in a discordant sing-song, tossing off lines like, “I can't fuck with niggas if they right-wing / Hell yeah, I love the fall and the spring.” Fan-made edits of the song and its music video yielded a number of popular posts on TikTok. Since then, his music has had a consistent presence on the platform, and clips of his always inventive dance moves on stage have taken on lives of their own.

While these posts have helped fuel the spread of his music, one discomforting side effect that’s emerged is fans treating the artist on their screens as more of a meme than real person. I would imagine you can only see your own face in a deep-fried edit so many times before it starts to feel dehumanizing. When I ask Xavier how he navigates the relationship between music and meme, he shrugs. “In this day and age, it just comes with it,” he says. “Everything is ironic at this point. I've heard people talk about how it's kind of killing art but you just gotta deal with it.”

Though his fate has been closely intertwined with online platforms from a very young age, Xavier’s rise hasn’t been about instant virality or online gimmicks. Instead, his path has been a steady build, one that has relied on his ability to read and react to the city around him as much as online. Five years on SoundCloud in the 2020s — where trending microgenres, novelty artists, and memes of the moment are here this week and gone the next — might as well be decades. “A lot of people from the outside looking in look at it like it’s some TikTok shit when I feel like I never really played into it, on some trying to play the algorithm,” he says. “That's why it grew how it grew.”

As soon as Covid restrictions started easing up in New York, Xavier was outside performing, building an IRL scene around his music. Sitting back at the bar at Supercharged after our first of three go-karting runs, Xavier and Ksuuvi tell me about their very first show in an Airbnb uptown.

“The owner of the bnb was staying there, he was a tweaker — him and his shorty.” Xavier says. “They had a ferret.”

“Yo, I fucking remember that,” Ksuuvi chimes in. “The owner was off meth.”

“They ended up getting tight, cops ended up coming, but it was already lit for like two or three hours,” Xavier says with a hint of nostalgia. “So, that shit was a success.”

DJ Rennessy remembers first meeting Xavier at a show in a park by the East River on July 3, 2022. In a video of the show, Xavier is lit up by phone lights as he performs early songs like “crisp dubs” and “Shawty Thro It Backk.” He’s standing over a laptop on a fold-out table as fireworks explode overhead and the mass of kids around him shake their whole bodies furiously to the blown out bass. It looks about as DIY as it gets. “I looked at him, and I was like I need to know who this kid is,” Rennessy says. “It was like, Holy fuck, this is the next thing.”

Despite it being 30-something degrees out, Xavier meets me at the door of his Upper East Side apartment building without a shirt on, wearing gray Nike Tech sweatpants and chunky Ecco sandals. He leads me down the hall and into his apartment, where two friends are playing a new edition of Fortnite featuring characters from South Park. As Xavier offers me a bottle of water from the fridge, I can faintly hear the unmistakable voices of Patrick Star and Sandy Cheeks from an episode of SpongeBob SquarePants playing somewhere downstairs.

We sit down at a glass dining table in the middle of the room. Next to remnants of a recently rolled spliff is a jumble of wires and chords attached to a bunch of recording equipment: the same mic and audio interface Xavier bought at the beginning of the pandemic, and an Apollo interface that was a more recent purchase.

Since he’s been performing on bigger stages, Xavier has been thinking about his music differently. He still loves his early work but says the sound quality on some of those recordings make them hard to perform, an issue he got closer to solving with the more polished sounds of Keep It Goin Xav and with 2. “I'm still pushing the sound, but now we could put this in the club, now we can do this and that,” he says. “Make it more — not accessible — but just package it better.”

The new album, Xavier, is a happy medium between where he came from and where he’s going. The single “iPhone 16,” with its extended falsetto section, feels like a crisper, elevated version of a classic Xavier song. While songs like the ethereal “100,000” and the party-ready “Werk Werk” cover most of his established bases, the beats are more expansive and the vocals more layered. Early listens revealed collaborations with Zaytoven and Skrillex — though the latter was ultimately left off the tracklist. There is also an improbable pairing of Swedish producer Yung Sherman and Flint rapper Rio Da Yung OG. Rather than Xavier switching styles to accommodate them, both artists sound as though they are entering his world.

As Xavier toes the line between outsider cult favorite and rising star, the question becomes how far he wants to push his music and himself. After the sold-out Webster Hall show in December, Rennessy tells about a conversation with Xavier that offered insight into where his ambitions lie. “He comes to me and he says, ‘Renn, you really see this shit? This is it. This is life,’” he recounts. Rennessy says it took a while for Xavier to see the same possibilities he saw when he first watched the young rapper perform that night in 2022; however, in just a few years, the two have gone from playing New York parks to selling out venues around the world.

Xavier’s rise brings to mind a piece of online terminology that’s become popular recently: the concept of having “trained ears.” If you search the phrase on TikTok, the results bring up clips of producers making beats using everything from iMessage sound effects to the sound of someone chewing a chip. Most of these videos are annoying, but what they’re essentially trying to say is that in order to appreciate certain music, you have to “train” your ears to enjoy it. Like all of his influences, Xavier’s music can be an acquired taste but that’s what good art does: repels some and attracts others. As he outgrows his online niche, his music will continue to provoke strong reactions, to have its haters and its evangelists.

I spent a lot of my late teens and young adulthood driving around with my friends, listening to some of the artists that inspired Xavier to make music, like Lil B. It was almost like he was speaking in a code that only we could understand, not just because of the words he was using but because of the production, the references, the universe he created that was only legible to us. In those years, the way the world worked outside those four car doors didn’t make much sense to me but the music did.

Xavier is heading out to write graffiti with some friends. For the first time, I notice the stacked boxes of spray paint next to his kitchen. I tell him that, while some of my friends grew up writing, I never got into it myself. “I’m toy,” he admits, using the subculture’s term for someone who’s just starting out, lacking in skill, and usually gets tagged over. “But you gotta start somewhere. You never know, if you keep going with it, you could get nice.”

Additional credits:
Lighting Director: Xavier Muniz @xavier_muniz
Digi Tech / Post: Gregory Alders @greg.alders
Photo Assistant: Jake Corcoran @mr.mju2
Production: Alex Swaim @swaim_alex
Assistant Stylist: Romy Safiyah @romysafiyah