Isaiah Rashad is grateful as fuck

Isaiah Rashad’s 32 gold teeth are beaming.

“I’m grateful as fuck,” the Top Dawg Entertainment rapper tells me as a plate of chimchurri-ed hangar steak is set down in front of him. He turns his phone horizontally to take a picture foodie-style. “I’m turning into my mom.”

The almost 36-year-old — whose birthday is less than 24 hours away — just released his third studio album, IT’S BEEN AWFUL, but he says he isn’t celebrating. Instead, over lunch at Lindens in New York City with his brother, management team, and this writer, he’s reflecting on all of the little steps it took to get here.

Originally, when he was just starting out in Tennessee, he thought he'd stay behind the scenes. “I got a gang of friends who make music too, I kind of assumed that I would end up doing what he does," he says, pointing at his manager. “Everybody knows I’m grateful. To the universe, to my creator, to the people that helped me get this shit off the ground, to my mom, to everybody.”

Rashad’s music carries a similar humility. While most rappers feel obligated to create braggadocious personas, Rashad’s vulnerability on 2014's Cilvia Demo and 2016's The Sun’s Tirade garnered him a close-knit and deeply protective fanbase. That helps explain why, 15 years since his debut, Rashad can still meet his listeners at eye-level, candid and unflinching.

On his latest release, IT’S BEEN AWFUL, Rashad raps about the weight of substance abuse and addiction. Yet across from me, cozily clad in black sweats from head to toe, he speaks with childlike reverence about recently leaving a theater with what he describes as “peak joy,” after seeing Man of Steel. “It’s like realistic Superman who realized he had powers at a very young age,” Rashad explains. “If he didn’t go dark, he would go all the way light.”

Immediately his track “SUPERPWRS” rings in my ears: How I make it through all that bullshit, I don't know / How I get sober, fucked up, then clean again? Almost giddy to confirm how the film left him feeling, he turns to his brother sitting next to him and asks, “Did I cry afterwards? I might have just been geeked up.” I realize his music might be a release valve, the way he remains a beacon in real life. Like when he lights up talking about his daughter, and I can see nearly every bit of gold in his mouth. “This is for my kid. Deadass.”

IT’S BEEN AWFUL is a true family affair for Rashad. His brother Timothy Vance (Tim), whom he credits as a central reason he was able to reach sobriety again, is also the primary producer across several of the album's core tracks, including the distorted intro “THE NEW SUBLIME” and the jazzy “DO I LOOK HIGH.” It’s something of a full-circle moment for the brothers, who tell me they were part of a three-sibling band growing up in Tennessee; Tim played the trombone, their other brother the tuba. “And I play the clarinet," Rashad laughs. “My mom wanted us to do something besides getting fucking concussions.”

The Chattanooga rapper is as involved in his brother’s creative career as Tim is in his – Rashad tells me he’s currently working on curating his brother’s canvas painting work and turning it into a formal art exhibit back home to spotlight local talent. “I’d like to use my little bit of light to shine on other people,” he says softly. “And in a dream world we’d get my mom to finally get off like this natural hair moisturizer/cleanser that she just never expanded outside of our kitchen."

Though these endeavors have little to do with music, they seem like outgrowths of the same creative impulse; Rashad calls himself the ultimate idea man. “I make a bunch of mini-projects all the time,” he says. “So I take whatever fits best out of all these little ideas I’ve had over weeks and they become an album [...] I just keep going, trying to build the world.” So for a rapper building a world made up of raw emotion, what genre would explain his life? The way he laughs next to his brother, I think he’ll say dark comedy, but he surprises me with, “Indie Horror.”

I don’t know if I’d fully agree: IT'S BEEN AWFUL isn’t just “depression rap,” and in front of me now, Rashad speaks with contentedness and hope. A few seconds later, almost as if acknowledging his own survival, Rashad pivots. He says he could also see his life as a Black version of Juno.

"That’s how life feels at some point in time. My imagination runs wild,” he says. “I feel like I’m in a little movie. Is it a romance? Or is it a tragedy? Somebody’s coming-of-age in those movies, and somebody’s fucking divorcing, and somebody’s dying. There’s a lot of shit going on.”

IT’S BEEN AWFUL captures all of those conflicting moods at once, navigating a dystopian present shaped by tech-bro greed and systemic collapse. Even the air feels commodified. But despite the heavy subject matter, Rashad infuses the record with his signature emotional warmth and an enduring focus on empathy beneath trunk-rattling 808s.

And the indie-pop reference points of Juno – “all that little '07, '08, super alt, white girl music. I like that kind of shit” – are laced directly into Rashad’s music. In fact, Rashad tells me Girl In Red's bedroom pop song “We Fell In Love In October” inspired the sonics of Prince-homage “BOY IN RED.” “It's whimsical,” he says of the style. “And it makes me feel like springtime.”

He knew “BOY IN RED” would be a hit from the jump. “Before I recorded it, I knew this is going to be great. And I was like, I should write more. And then I was like, no, I shouldn't. Just leave it like this. Then SZA came in a couple months ago.”

On the record, Rashad has no problem inviting us into the darkness. “I got nothing to hide / I'm torn inside-out,” goes one confessional; “In the shower, pouring liquor in the air /I was fucked up, baby,” he admits later. On “SCARED 2 LOOK DOWN,” Rashad raps, “Bout sixteen carats, I been cutting my wrist.”

Part of his candor comes from his strong sense of discernment, his ability to read people from an early age. “I’ve always had subtle access to the front thoughts of somebody’s mind – the way I would move through rooms and be able to pick who or who not to talk to seemed instinctual,” he says. “People would give me the heebie-jeebies too: I’d know that was a no for my life.”

As you might guess from the thorny, complicated subject matter on his albums, Rashad isn’t exactly a fan of casual conversation. "It feels like conning," he says of small talk. He’d rather go deep about A24 horror film The Green Room, cloudbusting, and the creative process behind his latest record. At the restaurant, as we reach the last few of truffle fries now on the plate in front of us, he shifts the subject to the gold in his mouth, which are not temporary grillz but fully replacements for his teeth.

“I kind of go back to post-slavery... it sounds kind of weird, but I link it to that kind of shit where it could be looking kind of like n***er-ish, but it’s not like an I made it type of thing,” he says. “It definitely differentiates on purpose. Like an homage to my heritage or the region I’m from.” They’re a nod to what he’s been through, just how far he’s made it.

I ask Isaiah one more time if he’s sure he isn’t going to do anything big to celebrate his birthday tomorrow. He sticks to his response from earlier. “[Celebrations] kind of go against my own made-up religion in my head. Like I’m going too close to like self-worship. Because I really like me, even in the worst times, but then I have to check myself and be like, you good. Like I’m just really good. You don’t need to do anything. Go have a coffee.”