Tory Lanez

Like his occasional sparring partner Drake, the rapper-singer-producer Tory Lanez is a natural omnivore, an artist who manages to soak up sounds from across the spectrum of hip-hop—from ’90s slow jams to 2010s trap, Caribbean dancehall to Canadian R&B—and spin it into something uniquely his own. Born Daystar Peterson in 1992, Lanez bounced around as a kid (Toronto, Montreal, Miami, Atlanta) before settling in Toronto in his early teens. His break came in 2009, when a string of self-directed videos he’d uploaded to YouTube caught the attention of Justin Bieber and Sean Kingston, the latter of whom gave Lanez a shot at a deal. Lanez quickly established himself as prolific and hard-hustling, kicking out as many as four mixtapes a year, demonstrating an unusual versatility as both a singer and a rapper. His first album, I Told You, came out in 2016; two more—MEMORIES DON’T DIE and LoVE me NOw—followed in 2018, amidst high-profile features with Future, Sean Paul, Rick Ross and Ty Dolla $ign. “I’ve got to tailor my style in a way that’s just like, you can’t trace it and can’t detect it,” Lanez told Apple Music about how he pulls his sound together. “I wanted to be able to trace it in a way where it was like, for me, just something that people were going to listen to and be like, ‘Yo, there’s so many things here that I can’t even hate on this.’”