Tory Lanez

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. “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.’” Evoking dreamy ’80s synth-pop, Lanez’s 2021 track “The Color Violet” went viral, minting him a multi-platinum hit. Three years after being convicted for the 2020 shooting of Megan Thee Stallion, he was sentenced to prison, from where he has continued to release albums. He meditated at length on his jail time across 2025’s PETERSON, before embracing higher BPMs on 2026’s LOL: SLUTTY BASS.