Vince Staples

In the glitzed-out trap dream of 2010s hip-hop, Vince Staples feels like a grounding force. Raised in Long Beach, California, Staples (born in 1993) started rapping in his teens, aligning himself peripherally with the Odd Future crew. Released in 2015 on the heels of a series of increasingly impressive mixtapes, his first album, Summertime ’06, felt like an instant classic—a bleak, boast-free coming-of-age story that recalled ’90s gangsta rap without a whiff of nostalgia. (A sharp interview and endlessly entertaining personality, Staples once complained that he thought the ’90s was overrated and never much figured into his life because in the ’90s he was, y’know, a baby.) His second LP, Big Fish Theory, took a dive into dance and electronic music without sacrificing any of the frankness that made his early work so striking—proof that he wasn’t the throwback some had pegged him as. Plainspoken and fiercely independent, he introduced his 2018 project, FM!, through his own Apple Music Radio show, RAMONA RADIO, with a backhanded apology: “We might not sell a gang of records,” he said. “We might not make millions of dollars. But y’all not nice like that. We nice like that.” In 2024, Dark Times portrayed an artist whose decade of success had come with complications, while June 2026’s Cry Baby painted a tense, scuzzy portrait of contemporary life in the US. A month later, Staples launched his second Apple Music Radio show, 5 on Fridays with Vince Staples. “Hopefully you love music,” he says of the show, “because that’s all we got.”