“I still wanna be one of the greats,“ rapper Jack Harlow tells Apple Music about his commitment to his craft. “I’m very ambitious about this. And I think I have what it takes to really make a mark because I love the art.” Harlow, born in 1998 in Kentucky, is well on his way to turning that dream into reality. Growing up in Louisville’s Highlands neighbourhood, Harlow started writing and rapping at the age of 12 and released his bouncy first EP before graduating high school in late 2015. Since his more fully realized mixtape, 18, dropped in 2016, Harlow has continued to inject his chill party rap and poppy beats with “addictive, candy-coated qualities,” as he described it to Apple Music. “It’s good on the ears.” With 2017’s Gazebo, he established a more mature sound, moodily riding through his hometown with the intense “Dark Knight” and keeping things dreamy using synth pulses on the regret-laden “Wasted Youth.” It’s a vibe he honed on multiple mixtapes in the late 2010s, keeping with a feel he says is representative of Louisville—smooth and laidback—while exploring elements of trap, which is native to his adopted home base of Atlanta. With every beat on 2020’s punchy, swaggering Sweet Action, Harlow moved closer to the place he sees as his inevitable destination: “On top.”