Yung Gravy
By way of hilarious ad-libs and airtight rhymes, Minnesotan Yung Gravy has emerged as a gold and platinum-certified phenomenon and music disruptor, vaulting from underground stalwart to mainstream force. He hit his stride in 2016, when he took to SoundCloud to begin releasing his own music. The first song he uploaded, “Karen,” quickly garnered new fans and created a palpable buzz online. In 2018, the “Snow Cougar” EP yielded a pair of platinum smashes – “Mr. Clean” and “1 Thot 2 Thot Red Thot Blue Thot” – and launched Gravy from early SoundCloud success to the hottest playlists on Spotify, including New Music Friday and Pop Rising, to name a few. As a follow-up, he sold out three tours in North America, two tours in Europe and a run in Australia and New Zealand. This hot streak continued as his world tour “Experience The Sensation, Part 2” also sold out.
During 2019, Gravy’s full-length debut, “Sensational” (Republic Records), crashed the Top 5 of Billboard’s Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums Chart and put up 450 million-plus streams across several singles, including “Alley Oop” (featuring Lil Baby) and “Gravy Train.” He has teamed up with frequent collaborator bbno$ on hits “Whip a Tesla” and “Welcome to Chilis” (both of which are certified gold); “Shinin on My Ex,” which Ones to Watch predicted as “a surefire Tik Tok hit”; and the single “Iunno,” which showcases the duo’s undeniable chemistry and verbal volley talents. In 2022, Gravy reached No. 30 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with the platinum-selling hit “Betty (Get Money).”
“At the end of the day, this is all meant to make people feel good,” Gravy explains. “This is party music, and everyone’s invited.”
bbno$
Blending hip-hop, R&B and electronic influences, bbno$ (“baby no money”) started releasing his music on SoundCloud in 2016. He got his first break when popular Chinese dance crew TFBoys used his song “Yoyo Tokyo.” Despite minimal clout at the time in his native Vancouver, that exposure enabled him to sell out back-to-back tours in China in 2017. In 2017 and 2018, he toured extensively in North America, Europe and Australia with his frequent collaborator Yung Gravy, first in support of their joint EP “Baby Gravy” and then for bbno$’s debut album, “bb steps.” bbno$’s musical output was (and is) prolific; during this era, he often released singles on a weekly basis, and he organically grew his audience until he crossed the threshold of 1 million Spotify monthly listeners in late 2018. In 2019, bbno$ self-released his sophomore album, “Recess,” and booked his first headlining American and European tours. In 2019, he released “Lalala,” a cheeky earworm of a rap single that nicely encapsulated his “ignorant but melodic” approach to hip-hop. “Lalala” erupted on a global scale and racked up 12 million streams within a couple of weeks. The following year, bbno$ became the 84th most-streamed artist in the world across genres on Spotify and received two JUNO Award nominations. He continued his upward trajectory with the release of his third album, “I Don’t Care at All.” bbno$ put out his fourth full-length album, “Good Luck Have Fun,” in October 2020 and saw it debut as the No. 8 album in the world on Spotify. bbno$ has continued to release a series of singles and music videos and, to date, his now extensive catalog of music has amassed more than 2,000,000,000 (yes, 2 billion) streams.