redveil

Just as a 20-year-old Nas rapped, in 1994, about the wisdom he’d accrued as the “essence of adolescence” left his body, redveil’s music is infused with a sense of knowledge and predestination that would be absurd were it not so self-evident. Born Marcus Morton in Washington, DC—20 years and one day after Illmatic was released—redveil was raised in nearby Prince George’s County, Maryland. His breakthrough project, 2022’s self-produced learn 2 swim, feels as if it were handmade by an expert craftsman despite being released on redveil’s 18th birthday; it shows his ability to synthesise a disparate sound palette in service of a singular vision. While many of his contemporaries on the East Coast have experimented with languid, laconic flows, redveil seemed to snap upright, full of verve and determined to communicate with great precision. Even as he burrows deeper into his own psyche, redveil pushes forward the DMV’s consistently inventive rap ecosystem.