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Editor’s note: skaiwater is nonbinary and uses she/they pronouns. This story uses the singular they for consistency.

Skaiwater is hiding from their fans.

90 seconds earlier, the 25-year-old had popped out from the backstage catacombs of Chicago’s Avalon Music Hall hunting for a quiet spot to spark up (indica with grabba, rolled in a paper). But the escape was short lived; they’d exited too close to the stage and were promptly spotted by a handful of people lingering near coat check. skai turns on their heel before the throng can even think to mob them and bursts into giggles. Now in a further corner, skai feels safe to spark up. Their lighter is like a flare in the shadows, but at this distance, their fans couldn’t photograph them if they tried.

skaiwater has been on tour for 19 days. Tonight is show 13 of 15 and their second performance in Chicago. Avalon Music Hall actually has two rooms, but skaiwater deliberately chose to book the smaller, which feels like it could host a neighborhood battle of the bands. skai wanted every venue to be 300 cap or smaller in an attempt to recapture the energy of seeing beabadoobee at a small club back in 2021. As a result, they say, the tour so far has been “pretty fried.” Every night, fans rush on stage just to fling themselves off, if skaiwater’s bodyguard Black doesn’t throw them back into the crowd himself. Their show in Orlando was especially memorable. “I said to someone the mosh pit looked like boiling water,” skaiwater says.

skaiwater’s vision for the tour was for it to be a “madhouse” which is an apt summary of how their music feels. On their 2024 album #gigi, skaiwater filtered regional scenes like baile funk and Jersey club into a bass-blown reinvention of dance music. Their latest album, February’s wonderful, abandoned that for straight-up chaos: elements of beats redline, melodies peak through layers of Auto-Tune and distortion, endlessly sampled vocals, adlibs, and SFX smash into each other at similar frequencies. Over the cacophony, skai raps about sex, drugs, and their rock & roll lifestyle, but also explores the way money and success corrupt art and love. “She don't want love,” skaiwater raps on “A THREESOME,” “she want a flight and some paper.”

skai jokingly calls it “nepo baby music,” a way to describe how their catalog has granted them an expensive lifestyle and the ability to do “a lot of random shit.”

“In the nepotism sense, I’m my own father, you feel me?” They take a long drag of their spliff. “I’m the son of what I’ve done before.” They exhale.

What skai did before: established a foothold in the SoundCloud underground, inked a deal with GoodTalk, formerly known as Cinematic Music Group, went wildly viral on TikTok, released their first major-label project on Geffen Records, cinched a new deal with Capitol Records, and dropped an album and EP of exhilarating post-dance music. But in February 2025, they turned their back to the industry and went independent again.

All art offers a window into the time of its creation, but more than any other contemporary musician, skaiwater sounds like the brutal, beautiful chaos of now, iridescent and jagged and bitcrushed beyond belief. Post-genre and fitting alongside the digital maximalism of artists like 100 gecs and Jim Legxacy, skaiwater’s music can feel like being beset with notifications or pop-up ads, but the overstimulation is part and parcel of understanding skaiwater’s vision of rap music today and, perhaps, the present state of the world: what it’s like living in a country that supports fascism at home and genocide abroad, and all the mindless complacency and endemic oppressions that fuel these cycles of violence.

skai has reached the end of their spliff. Through the doors, they hear MainoDaPlug hype up the crowd and head back inside. In the greenroom, skai greets their opener Ti Steele’s parents and poses for photos with Steele’s younger sisters. They also flick up with Vanderpump Rules alum Jo Wenberg, who tells me after the concert that she was blown away by skai’s “punk” energy, comparing it to a recent Taking Back Sunday show.

skaiwater’s music is often intense, sometimes even deliberately challenging. But it is not so niche nor inaccessible as their detractors would have you believe. If that offends genre purists and intractable peers, skaiwater doesn’t care. They know their songs speak for the people that need it.

“A lot of people talking about hip-hop don’t come from hip-hop,” they say. “Bro, it's a group of kids changing how we listen to this type of music. People just gotta get with it or get left. The discourse is the discourse, but the history will stay.”

The day before their first Chicago show I’m waiting for skaiwater outside a coffee shop near Anish Kapoor’s giant metallic paraboloid “Cloud Gate,” known colloquially as The Bean. The sky is mildly overcast and I’m finishing a cigarette when skai arrives with their tour manager Kevin, bodyguard Black, and Ti Steele in tow. skai is dressed in almost all black with a balaclava over their head and furry boots on their feet. Their cluster of facial piercings — nose, dermal, brow — glitters when the sun breaches cloud cover. And despite the fact that their bomber jacket bears a logo that reads “new day same pain,” skai is in high spirits, greeting me warmly as we pop inside so everyone can get snacks. skai, who’s already holding a Sprite bottle filled with bright crimson soda, declines to purchase anything.

It’s their first time back in Chicago since Summer Smash 2025 and a slight gap in their tour schedule means they’ve been able to relax a little, which really means they’ve been catching up on sleep. I mention that I saw Chicago rapper lil2posh perform after that same festival last year, and skaiwater immediately declares him the “best dressed of my generation” before directing Kevin to invite him to the show. (posh, we later learn, is unfortunately in Atlanta and can’t make it.)

When we’d scheduled this interview, skaiwater’s publicist told me the rapper wanted to go for a walk but I wasn’t expecting it to be at one of the most foot-trafficked spots in the city. But if any of the tourists snapping photos of the reflective surface of The Bean recognize skai, they leave them be. We quickly find ourselves almost eerily alone for much of our walk through Millennium Park.

At 5’7”, skaiwater moves much faster than their frame would suggest. They haven’t grown since their high school years, they say, wryly noting that their height has probably kept them from being arrested on some occasions. We periodically have to slow down to keep from outpacing their entourage and they begin telling me about their life growing up in the U.K.

skaiwater was born Tyler Ryan Lee Jordan Brooks on August 31, 2000, to a British-Jamaican mother and a Sierra Leonean father in Nottingham, the central England city where their grandparents immigrated. Their brother Elijah was born a few years later. Growing up, they shared a bedroom and twin bunk beds until skai turned 18, finished film college, and began traveling to the U.S.

As a child, skai remembers spending school hours making Sonic the Hedgehog pixel art in Minecraft and being frightened by the murals at Wollaton Hall, a popular local landmark for school trips and birthday celebrations. But outside of these foggy details, skai tells me they don’t have any other “strong memories” of this period of their life. As we traipse southward past empty outdoor stages and flowers just beginning to bud, they’d much rather talk about the music they grew up with.

“R&B and pop, obviously, but a lot of baseline garage music back home. They would flip R&B songs, innit,” they recount, giddily. skai attributes their early music taste to their mom, who had skai when she was just 17 and would play music for them while she drove around in their car. “That’s why I love Kanye so much. I really am a mummy’s boy.”

skaiwater’s dad was a Yeezy fan, too: They remember him chopping up soul beats in the kitchen when they were young. They’re particularly fond of an old cut where their dad flipped “Never Gonna Let You Go” by Blackstreet, breaking into song as they repeat the hook into my recorder. “The past era of hip-hop, a lot of it was based off of sampling. That’s what made it hit for people culturally, repurposing shit that we weren’t supposed to use,” they say.

skaiwater started making music when they were 10, producing their earliest instrumentals on an iPad with GarageBand (“Was ass bro. That shit was terrible”). They got their feet wet engineering and producing for their dad and Elijah, who started rapping first. Around the age of 16 or 17, a freestyle session in the car prompted their dad to encourage skai to make music. It was the final push skai needed to step out from behind the boards and in front of the mic.

skaiwater started posting about music on the Internet forum Kanye To The before moving to Twitter and Instagram around 2018. They joined a Twitter group chat for aspiring musical artists where they met Lil Nas X, pre “Old Town Road” fame, and began consistently releasing music. After Nas X blew up, skaiwater fielded a series of dead-end meetings with Def Jam and other labels in the spring and summer of 2019. At the end of that year, they met A&R Sean Mula of Cinematic Music Group, later GoodTalk, who impressed skai enough to agree to a record deal.

Mula, a clean-cut white guy whose beard and glasses remind me a little of Jack Harlow, discovered skaiwater on YouTube through their song “hellfire” which trappily flipped J. Cole’s “In The Morning.” “skai was very melodic on it, sing-rapping,” Mula says. “skai is a very unique voice, which is something I always look for.”

skaiwater’s earliest output — 2019’s After God Fear Eve and 2020’s Party Pack — was heavily inspired by Atlanta rap but “those records weren’t really connecting,” Mula says. Many of skai’s signature motifs coalesced a couple years later when they started producing more and experimenting with genres. “They started sending me demos that were drum & bass and EDM and Jersey club. That shit just clicked.”

Things were clicking for skaiwater outside of the studio, too. Visiting America to work on music in Atlanta and Los Angeles had expanded their opportunities and horizons, including their language for gender identity. Skai says that they first began to think of themself as nonbinary just before the pandemic though, they specify, the process was more about gaining the language to explain who they’d always been rather than experiencing a change in identity.

In Nottingham, skai says they didn’t have any exposure to nonbinary people though their mother had gay and trans friends. “Growing up where I grew up, especially around a lot of Jamaican people, lower class people in that mindset, it's kind of hard to get the right information about certain shit,” they say. “I spent a lot of my life just questioning everything. The label is only an answer to the question I had. There’s no escaping labels, so you might as well find one that you like.”

One person skaiwater credits with helping them understand themselves better is Lil Nas X. “He’s been like an angel for me. He’s guided me spiritually a lot when I’ve been lost,” skaiwater says. “Outside of music, outside of career, outside of looking for anything in the material world.” They applaud Nas X for breaking down mainstream barriers as an openly gay rapper. “He showed me early it's possible to not fall into that hypermasculine trap a lot of young black people fall into when they come up,” they say.

The culture has been primed for a gender nonconforming rapper, if only in fits and starts. Lil Uzi Vert beginning to identify as nonbinary circa 2022 pushed hip-hop blogs to learn about they/them pronouns, if only inconsistently. Even with these forebears, skaiwater has broached previously unprecedented territory for mainstream hip-hop. On their 2024 album #gigi, skai actively toys with gender expression, labeling themselves a “platinum bitch” on “rain” and keening, “Play with my / pussy not my emotions,” on “real feel.” They paint their nails and wear women’s clothing occasionally, though their style still generally adheres to the black clothing and exaggerated silhouettes of Playboi Carti’s OPIUM aesthetic.

To skaiwater, these displays are an unglamorous documentation of their life not an attempt to push an agenda with their music, though they agree that all art is political. Still, choosing to depict their real, gender-nonconforming life is inevitably charged, particularly now. “I was tryna be a boy for you,” they rap on “one battle after another,” a line that speaks not only to gendered expectations in their personal life but the pressure from the industry to present a certain image as a rapper, they say. It’s this candor that’s garnered them a fervent fanbase, legions of teens and 20-somethings who flood the comments of their finsta and show up to shows with trinkets for skaiwater to sign, or even just keep. And despite the predictably close-minded commenters calling them zesty on YouTube, skaiwater remains unphased.

“It's not my business how people feel about me,” they say. “I've been here from the jump. I came in this bitch, knowing what the fuck I wanted to do — so it doesn't matter how they feel.”

If skaiwater sounds assured in their identity and artistry today, it’s because their current position has been hard won. Their big break happened in 2021 when they put out the Jersey club bop “#miles,” which manifested skaiwater a major label deal and a trip to work with Lil Uzi Vert during the Pink Tape sessions (more on this later). skaiwater’s subsequent 2022 project, rave, was released by Geffen Records. Later, the rapper switched to Capitol Records for the release of their 2024 album #gigi and 2025 EP #manicinamerica.

For skai, the choice to sign with the majors was a practical one. “skai had two of the biggest TikTok records of the year,” Mula says of that time. “You have records that are moving online, you want a major label to put that machine behind it.”

But that sort of success can be a double-edged sword, especially when you’re as fastidious and idiosyncratic as skaiwater. When the virality wore off and the label had to face skai’s increasingly unconventional soundkit and marketing strategies — like forgoing a singles rollout to drop February’s wonderful all at once with a deluge of snippet videos — it became clear the artist and label had different priorities.

“Major labels really want you to have something that’s moving on TikTok, which we didn’t have at the moment,” Mula says of the reception of #gigi. “Even with ‘rain’ — that’s one of skai’s biggest records and it was such a huge cultural moment. But if there aren’t numbers behind it, it doesn’t get rated the same way in that sort of building.”

“#gigi showed people my values,” skai adds. “With [wonderful], we were aware [my label] couldn’t really handle what the fuck was going on.”

When skaiwater left Capitol in February 2025, it was with a determination to pursue their artistic vision with or without backing from the majors. But when I ask them if artists in 2026 still need record label infrastructure, skai offers an unexpectedly diplomatic answer. “I think everybody need it if you want to get anywhere in this industry,” they sigh. “You need the right people if you want to get anywhere in this industry. I was blessed enough to be able to make that decision; a lot of people can't make that decision.”

Their music, however, tells a more caustic story. On “MARILYN,” the penultimate song of wonderful, skai raps, “I’m over it, said fuck a major label / as for now, niggas still getting paid.” On a separate loosie from October, “say Jordan,” skaiwater discusses working with Uzi back during the Pink Tape sessions. The track reveals that not too long after those sessions, skaiwater got a label offer from Interscope but the splits were atrocious. skai had to pass.

“I love all my industry heads, I took the blue pill,” skai raps in a tongue-in-cheek bar on that song. When I ask them to break down the Matrix metaphor, they explain, “Blue pill is accepting the reality you're in and working with it instead of going against it.” skaiwater used to ineffectually flail against label practices, thinking they could “create a new world overnight.” But that experience showed them “that’s not how life works,” they say.

There’s a litany of other disses sprinkled across their recent discography, from shots at other underground rappers ian and fakemink, to repeated allusions to Lil Uzi Vert and Young Thug trying to sign them, and sharpened critiques of extractive label deals and inauthentic artists. I’ve recently been enthralled by a clip in which skai raps, “Pussy nigga from a good home thinks his advance is money […] when it all falls down, watch your back ‘cause your team will stop botting.” The music isn’t just a portrait of the industry, but a guide for those willing to read between the lines.

skaiwater isn’t arguing for artists to secede from record labels, but there have been benefits to leaving the majors. skai’s been free to release and promote their music as they like, including but not limited to releasing Playboi Carti cover art homage, pursuing K-pop collaborations with i-dle and CORTIS, generally dropping whatever they want on a SoundCloud, and starting up an OnlyFans (presumably SFW; I don’t subscribe).

As eclectic as these tactics may seem, skaiwater’s internet-native approach is fine tuned to the attention economy and outrage cycles that define modern life. At one point in our conversation, they characterize their gender as all-encompassing (“I am the spectrum”) and it reminds me of the “yes-and” mindset steering their career right now, balancing their anti-commercial impulses with a propensity for unforced clipfarming. But sometimes, even that can feel like sleight of hand, as if skaiwater would rather we stopped looking at them and looked more closely at things around us. “Again, the album’s a commentary: I’m saying it to flex, but it’s not a flex at all.”

After an hour and a half of walking, skaiwater and I have circuitously migrated to Chicago’s Field Museum, sitting side by side on the white marble steps to catch our breath as their tour manager orders an Uber Black to the venue for soundcheck. The sky has cleared since we started walking. A cloudless cerulean vista fills our field of vision.

It’s hard to tell if the greater points about industry, fame, and America in skaiwater’s music are going over their fans’ heads or not. On tour, when skaiwater performs “say Jordan,” their fans thunderously chant every last word: “Her daddy got connects, so it’s cool / she groomed my ass she picked me up from school / her daddy fuck with Epstein but he never took his mask off.” skaiwater sticks the landing on this wickedly grim line as their allusions to abuse, conspiracy, and the occult cohere into a bleak view of the music industry as a microcosm for the world.

On Friday evening, squirreled away in the depths of the green room, I ask skaiwater why they choose to explore these heavy topics in their music.

“I feel like hip-hop is one of the world’s greatest versions of journalism and it made sense for me to just… talk,” they say. “Some of the personal situations I went through with people in my life, having to cut certain people out for those same reasons, it did resonate with some of the shit I was seeing at the time about the world. Misogyny extends to everything we consume, that’s kind of what I’m trying to get out with my art. Are we all going to stop talking about it? Realistically, are we going to turn the music off? ‘Cause I 100% hear it bro. But that’s kind of why I made this album.”

Earlier that afternoon, as we’d crossed through the North Rose Garden at Grant Park, skaiwater had credited the “strong women” in their life for their sense of ethics. “[My mum] is a high-vibrating person — all the women in my life, to be honest,” they said. “I picked up on the morals of that, the way of life through that. She taught me a lot about moving with love.” Remembering that moment now, I wondered how they reconcile their personal code with working with people like Uzi and Carti, commercially successful artists with flagrant allegations.

“Whether we know it or not, there’s places where we’re complacent and a lot of abuse we don’t know about. Especially in the music industry,” skaiwater says. “Unfortunately, as consumers, we get what we ask for — and we glorify what we ask for as a collective.”

For some, these feminist concerns will fall flat when juxtaposed with some of skai’s more flagrantly sexual lyrics. But I don’t see skaiwater’s beliefs as hypocritical. Instead, these contradictions underscore how our lofty ideals can quickly deflate under the pressure of reality, an unflinching snapshot of what it takes to actually live in the world around us.

“I didn’t lie on the album at all,” skai says. “The life I live… it’s like bro, this industry was here before any of us. I just feel like I’m documenting the state of the world.”

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