When my car pulls up on a shadowy, vacant street at the edge of Santa Monica on a Monday night in early August, it feels like I’ve won the lottery. Locking down this meeting was impossibly arduous, to the point that it felt like I was trying to interview a sitting president. I stumble up and down the block in the darkness, scanning for numbers. Eventually, a burly security guard walks out of a hidden gate and motions toward me, the suspicious-looking loiterer. “I’m here to interview the rapper Nettspend,” I say sheepishly, and he ushers me in.
Entering the small, calm studio, I’m immediately met by what sounds like a teething toddler—caaawh, buhbuh, planuhhh, kuttuh. On the far side of the room, a 17-year-old sits in a swivel chair, craned over a mic, rattling off surreal ad-libs. “Run it back,” Nettspend murmurs, and he begins a micro-section of the song again, darting between zoological noises and lyrics so chewed-up they’re like mad-scientist blurts more than meaningful sentences. There’s a Sprite on the table, a fast food bag on the ground. Every now and then, Nett pauses to light a joint or hit a vape with so many colours and buttons it looks like a fidget cube from the year 2050. When I walk in, he gives me a giddy smile and a little fist bump.
Nettspend, real name Gunner Shepardson, is at IAG Studios to work on his debut album, which is destined to be an instant classic or a total dumpster fire, depending on who you ask (and what generation they’re from). He’s 2024’s most beloved and reviled new rapper, and the rise has been swift. Nettspend was a total unknown in early 2023; now, he’s been streamed tens of millions of times, and commands huge, frenzied crowds at festivals like Rolling Loud. Diehards worship Nettspend as new-gen rap’s Justin Bieber, with “ungodly levels of aura”: they love his sleek fits, the crystalline sparkle of his voice, the way his bleach-blond hair flops perfectly. But Nett inflames haters too – he’s become a prominent example of trends that hip-hop heads and mumblephobes deplore. Online, they clown him relentlessly, calling him a posturing impostor and appropriator, and question why a white teen is being exalted for rapping about loving lean. “If you enjoy listening to nettspend you def have brain damage and needa be put in a psych ward,” goes one hate-letter.
His music is a symphony of stimuli, a vortex of slurred boasts seemingly engineered for the MrBeast brain. It’s at once feral and dissociative—imagine chugging Prime Energy while melting in a ketamine daze. It’s like musical retention editing, the sickeningly intense video format where lights, arrows, sounds, and Subway Surfer–Family Guy split-screens try to keep you from clicking away. His best songs, like the spasming “Wake up,” are dense with arctic-shiver synths and drums that flurry so fast it feels like your heart’s going into arrhythmia. Detractors say there’s nothing below the shimmery surface, and they’re not entirely wrong. Nett is the latest in a wave of post-Travis Scott and Playboi Carti rappers who prioritise amorphous vibes over stories, mantras over meaning. But he litters his lyrics with so many disjointed freakouts (Slut truck! Wait, wait, wait, waaah! Purge, purge, purge! I’m rocking Birkenstocks, I’m like a chill-ass motherfucker, fuck CPS I’m filthy rich) that they quickly infest your mind. The way Nett inverts trope-y refrains so they’re endearingly wonky is reminiscent of the Swedish cloud rapper Bladee. Take his “Bitch I’m in the Rich” chant, which doubles as a hometown callout and surrealist visual of him avalanched in cash—but also makes it sound like he’s only recently learned English. And just when you think his music is all slogan and hype-up chant, he sprinkles in enough raw emotion – “hold my hand if you think it’s for life” – to make you a little misty-eyed.
Back in the studio, Nett scoots over a little in his chair. I have to thrust my recorder forward to catch his faint responses. Part of the reason Nettspend wants to release an album is so he can process his rapidly changing life, make a snapshot of growing up in real-time. “I never dropped a tape, and everybody around me, all my friends have,” he reflects earnestly, as if he’s the last classmate to be selected in a schoolyard pick. While he sometimes disgorges songs and ideas with feverish frequency, he craved a chance to work carefully on a project. “I definitely grew up the fastest, and I wanna take my time with something.”
Now, Nett’s telling the engineer he wants to do another take, and another. Trim this ad-lib from that layer; listen back then add a few more crawwww and buzzuhs at the end of this bar. Watching him from a low-hanging couch in the back of the recording room, it becomes apparent that Nett builds out his songs with startlingly surgical precision. He’s constantly tweezer-ing out bits of the beat or facelifting verses by grafting on sentence fragments. When he plays back the track through the speakers, it’s a slipstream of shiny vocals over maybe the most drunk, damaging, borderline supernatural beat he’s ever used. To pull off this track live, he’d need a choir of ad-libbers trained in Nettspendian squeak-speak.
2024 was a nonstop highlight reel for Nett, except for That One Hiccup. In July, he dropped “That One Song,” which rewires the volcanic blur of Deftones’ “Entombed” into a rage rap banger. It seemed destined to take over TikTok, and even the most zealous haters conceded that the video of Nett theatrically flying is glorious. But a couple of days later, the song was mysteriously taken offline. Over the next few weeks, nearly all of Nett’s biggest songs were also removed without explanation. Fans speculated that the songs were copyright struck by Deftones or trolls making false claims, but nothing has been confirmed. (Deftones did not reply to i-D’s request for comment.) Nett’s staunchly devoted fans were so outraged when “That One Song” was taken down that they overran the Deftones subreddit, spamming it with vicious messages until the forum became a “war zone” and had to be temporarily closed.
Tonight, Nett refuses to explain the Deftones sample-clearing situation. In fact, it often feels like he’s intentionally giving vague answers to stoke intrigue. After certain questions, I can’t tell if he’s thinking deeply or just doesn’t want to answer; sometimes he turns his head solemnly and stares straight ahead. In these moments, the soundproof room becomes so still and silent it resembles a library, where I can hear every micro swivel-chair CREAK and bubble of carbonation POP in his Sprite. When I ask if he dreams of working with anyone, he’s quiet for 10 seconds before he replies: “Yo mama.”
It makes sense that this teen, who’s barely done any interviews and whose every Insta post gets scrutinised by Redditors and shitpost pages, might be paralysingly paranoid about revealing too much. At one point, he asks if I can delete my recording of our conversation after I write this piece, seemingly worried that his plain speech will leak and become a “$1,000 Group Buy For Nettspend In-Studio Interview Vocals” situation. He’s clearly feeling an immense amount of pressure, even if he wants to come off nonchalant. He repeatedly mentions feeling like he needs to deliver a special album for his fans, “to give everybody what they want, for real.”
“If I stayed in school, I just would have been more stupid, you know?”
Growing up in Richmond, Nett was surrounded by music; his dad was a country singer with a “really good voice.” He’s influenced by the guttural drill pioneer Chief Keef and vocally acrobatic weirdos like Lil Uzi Vert and Young Thug, but he also liked pop. “I grew up on some Justin Bieber shit, Katy Perry, I was always fucking with everything,” he says. “I listened to all of Michael Jackson. I saw the movies, had the glove.” He says the Deftones love came from a girl he knew when he was 14. Watching Nett command crowds, you can sense he’s spent time studying how these stars, pop and nu-metal alike, convulse and hop onstage.
Alongside the music, Nett spent his childhood watching hi-jinks-filled media like Zoey 101, Girl Meets World, SpongeBob, and the cinematic works of Jim Carrey. “Watching all those movies at a young age gave me some sort of inspiration for who I am,” he muses. Nett rode dirtbikes and he was heavily into skateboarding — a passion sparked by his late uncle, who gifted him a board but died before they ever had a chance to skate together. (“Long live Corey,” he murmurs.) Hanging out at a local park in northwest Richmond, Nett harboured dreams of skate stardom that never panned out.
He was also in school, until he was kicked out in ninth grade. “After Covid happened, I was never able to go back,” he says, explaining that the forced lockdown and aimlessness of quarantine messed him up badly. “After all that Covid quarantine shit fucked my shit up, I wasn’t really doing nothing,” he says. “I was just making music, skipping this shit. If I stayed in school, I just prolly would have been more stupid, you know?”
Still, the only point he becomes really glum in the studio – gazing off into the distance with a kind of yearning resignation – is when he considers the faint possibility of being able to return. “I might go back for a day, maybe. I just wanna go to class. Really just wanted to see what senior year was like.”
For the moment, though, Nett’s busy. He’s been dabbling in music since fifth grade – around 2017, 2018 – but it was only in December 2022 that he committed to it. That came from the prodding of his high school friend Nick Zuro, a rapper who performs and records using just his surname. Zuro was the one who hooked Nett up with Xaviersobased, the frenetic leader of New York’s fried underground rap scene and lynchpin of the group 1c34. Zuro also brought Nett onto Discord and the private channel for WitchGang, an anarchic collective that includes underworld rap pioneers like St47ic and p6nk.
WitchGang introduced Nett to people who’d become homies and key collaborators, like the 21-year-old theatre kid-turned-producer Reklus1ve. Rek and Nett made a song together within the first 10 minutes of initially connecting on Discord. Early in their friendship Nett was really into Roblox simulations of shooting games. “He was really drilling shit on Roblox, bro,” Rek laughs, sitting on a bench in Brooklyn’s Saratoga Park. “When I first met him, all I hear is du-du-du, bruh, bruh, ‘I got Mini-Uzi come spin,’ bruh. They’re talking about real-life guns but they’re in Roblox.”
Rek says Nett is willing to take a chance on every beat he sends. “It’s not like he’s the most knowledgeable about music, he just has a really good idea of what he wants to do with it,” he explains. He thinks of Nett like a younger brother; last year, Rek celebrated his 20th birthday by watching the doofy sitcom My Name Is Earl with Nett and friends on Discord.
Recently, their server has become inactive because most of the members have been seeing real-world success. For Nett, that moment came in mid-2023 with the Mag and Xion Orion-produced “shine n peace,” a pump-up anthem that, with its shout outs to day-ones and come-ons to tall girls, could soundtrack a coming-of-age internet rap film. The clouted shitpost page Hyperpop Daily crowned it the 2023 Song of the Summer.
Maybe the most pivotal moment in Nett’s rise was a show that summer, at the Bushwick venue Market Hotel. Despite being in the opening slot (for Xaviersobased and Quinn), the crowd bounced madly and the wood floor juddered as his songs rippled across the room. Clips infested the internet rap scene; “this ‘shine n peace’ performance is rly a part of history now,” reads one YouTube comment.
From the start, Nett’s music was remarkably polished, even though he didn’t have any professional equipment and made everything in quick bursts on the BandLab, a phone app which lets you record from wherever and easily add effects. He recorded the vocals for his second major tune – the dizzying, Zoot-produced “drankdrankdrank” – in just 10 minutes, tucked away in his mom’s car in the driveway so he didn’t make noise inside the house. He told me he made another track on his phone while hanging in a laundromat in Richmond. This DIY, on-the-fly spirit is mirrored in the way his producers work. Rek and collaborator Votekk cranked out the beat for one of Nettspend’s most hypnotic early songs, the cosmic, churning “take you out,” in seven minutes while riding the C train from Queens to the Lower East Side. They sent it, and within the hour Nett called to tell them he’d “just made a hit.”
So much of the thrill you feel when listening to Nettspend’s music comes from the collision of fluttering vocal cadences and epileptic beats. It’s like a max-voltage version of Xavier’s free-floating drones. Nett’s flow is less stream-of-consciousness than gleam-of-consciousness, words shivering between laser beams of synth. The New York Times’ Jon Caramanica, a certified Nettspend Truther, pinpoints the rapper’s appeal as his ear for production tricks and his “confident slithering” over the beat. His vocals echo, short-circuit, superimpose, sputter out into Auto-Tuned ribbons. Sometimes, as on the wintry banger “What they say,” he restarts the song halfway and replays everything at nightcore speed. Rek says Nett often requests beats that feel “happy and evil,” or use the prettier, emotional scales to make gorgeously dissonant melodies. The roots of Rek’s style is an enticing blend of stuff like euphoric trance, the frayed “tread” style associated with the Working on Dying collective, and the witch house band Salem. Other Nett beatmakers like Zoot and Ok deploy a similar palette of demonic synths and angelic textures.
Viral moments have supercharged Nett’s ascent – most notably, a show with collaborators Xavier and Yhapojj at NYC’s Mercury Lounge in December. The promoters overbooked and didn’t let anyone in; frustrated fans dragged the venue’s security scanner into the middle of the street and smashed it to pieces. The trio regrouped at a nearby skate park and played from atop a van. A flood of co-signs also granted him legitimacy – peep his early collaboration with Duwap Kaine, which happened after Xavier played Nett’s music to the underground tastemaker. Recently, Nett broke brains when he met Anna Wintour at the Vogue World show in Paris. “I just walked up to her, we weren’t in a meeting or nothing. I just said what’s up,” he recalls. He’s pretty sure he’s seen The Devil Wears Prada. “I think my grandma was watching it one time.”
The hysterical fanfare around Nettspend seems to be an odd combo of actual admiration and ironic put-on – people baffled that a white teen is tapped in with fashion moguls and rap innovators, or hyperbolically gassing him up as the GOAT. Nettspend’s appeal lies in both the music and this larger paratextual spectacle: the worst-rapper-ever versus 2020s Kurt Cobain arguments, the gibberish Instagram shitposts explaining how to make Nettspend Drank, the constant deluge of inane moments (Did you hear he just unfollowed Osamason then blasted Taylor Swift’s “Love Story” at a show?). Nett offers something to fight and joke over, a conduit for feeling at a time when many music listeners are ridden with ennui and overwhelmed by the algorithmic morass of half-baked stars and subgenres.
Even his management is leaning into the ridiculousness: a T-shirt on sale at his New York show in June shows the teen wearing a suit and tie with an American flag enamel pin, posing regally next to a giant American flag in front of the Manhattan skyline. People are now trying to flip the shirt for $1,000. I ask Nett if he plans to run for President someday and, after 30 seconds of silence, he deadpans: “Yeah, prolly in a couple years.” His platform? “Free candy. Remove the jail system.”
Weeks later, at Restless Fest in the industrial zone of East Williamsburg, the massive crowd is so deafening it’d probably make Donald Trump fire off a bunch of “Nutty Nett” tweets in jealousy. The sea of young rap fans stirs violently for Xavier and Osamason, but things hit another level of thrash mob when the 17-year-old vaults onstage for the headlining throwdown. I’m eating a disgusting cheesesteak at the back when I hear the iconic Kill Bill siren that opens his set. I chuck the sandwich in the trash and hurtle straight for the malodorous swamp of moshers.
The performance is electric. Nett only raps about half the lyrics and instead accents bars with batshit-crazy screams. The way he shrieks draaannnkkk is terrifying, like a cyborg melted down so all that’s left is malfunctioning vocal cords. Tearing across the stage, he howls yaaaaa and pulaaaaah and SLUT TRUUUUCKKKK with the caterwauling catharsis of someone exorcizing demons.
Crisis strikes halfway through, when the audio cuts out during “shine n peace.” The fans keep going, chanting every line from memory. But Nett, after waiting a second, storms off stage. The visuals shut off and the crowd breaks out in disarray. People begin to boo and leave in droves. “Are you fucking serious? I came from Long Island for this,” someone wails. Eventually, the music is fixed and Nett comes back to rapturous cheers. “I’m so sorry y’all couldn’t get geeked up with me,” he repeats as he skips around the stage, sounding genuinely pained for the audience.
“I wasn’t frustrated, but I [wanted] more for my fans,” Nett says, approximately 30 seconds after the show ends, after I’m hurriedly shoved with him behind the stage and into a white room that looks like a detention cell. He’s sitting shirtless, heaving with exhaustion while spewing phlegm on the floor. A red “BAD” stomach tattoo glistens with sweat. He’d just flown in for the set a few hours before, listening to sets from Xavier and Osamason from his dressing room. Many of his musical “brothers” – collaborators, friends from WitchGang – came out to support him tonight, along with his dad. “That shit’s an amazing feeling,” he says slowly, beaming ear to ear. It’s a complete inverse of how sedate he was in the studio.
He says his favourite tune to play tonight was “16”, an 80-second zap of a song that disses Child Protective Services. I ask if anyone has ever called CPS on him. “Shit, I would never really know,” he replies, considering the idea. Before I can say anything else, his manager says time’s up, whisking him out of the room. He momentarily stops to chat with a small boy who looks like Nettspend Jr. before dissolving into his entourage.
It’s obvious why this music resonates so much with teens, who snap photos of Nett like they’re cosplaying TMZ paparazzi. Nett is tantalisingly unavailable, and stays mum about his movements and private life. He feels like a throwback to an earlier, more exclusive era of stardom, when celebrities barely posted online and every drop felt like a must-see moment. He’s the perfect avatar for an age when rap fans seem increasingly unable to explain why they like certain artists. For many, it all boils down to ineffable aura, those amorphous characteristics – nonchalance, beauty, swagger, hype, relatability – that add up to a compelling idol. Nettspend’s aura has put him on a meteoric rise. But the intangibility of the love also means he could just as quickly implode if, say, he pisses his diehards off by leaving shows early, he’s filmed doing something cringe, or he drops a crap tape. Right now, he’s at a precipice. A genius album could elevate him into real-deal fame.
At the exit to the festival, everything is carnage: a gridlock of guards, cars, black SUVs, and sweaty shirts moving every which way. Some people are screaming the rappers’ names; others are blasting their songs out of speakers on the side, reliving the concert they just attended. Toward the right, a horde of fans are sprinting up the street. They’re chasing what seems to be Nettspend’s car, desperate for a last glimpse. But the car keeps going.
Text: Kieran Press-Reynolds
Photography: Morgan Maher