Photo by Kieran Press-Reynolds
Love it or hate it, LAZER DIM 700 is taking off. We sat down with the polarizing Atlanta rapper in NYC to talk beats, rap fans, and dumplings.
July 18, 2024
BY Kieran Press-Reynolds
Dim’s rapid rise came with a swift backwash of backlash—oldheads saying he’s ruining hip-hop, Redditors trashing his music as “ADHD rap,” spectators questioning if he’s an industry plant. Lazer claims he was never fazed by the hate.
"If the beat is good, I really can’t control myself. The beat tells me what to say. If the beat is bad, it’s like a little f*cked-up tattoo. I got so many f*cked-up tattoos, they’re just artwork.”
“What is a dumpling?” LAZER DIM 700 asks after we sit down in one of Chinatown’s tastiest soup dumpling restaurants.
It’s hard to tell when the 22-year-old Atlantan is being serious. Sometimes, he’ll make a bizarre remark, wait a few seconds with a sober expression, then burst into giggles. Other times, he’ll say something outrageous, say “no, no,” then “yes,” then “no” again, like there’s a committee of tiny fact-checkers in his brain deciding whether what he just said is true or not in real-time. When I show him the picture on the menu, he nods his head slowly and gravely, like a lifetime’s knowledge of dumpling consumption is returning. When he pulled up to Supreme Restaurant with his crew—his producer Goxan and managers Kim and Vitali—he loitered outside for a few minutes, lighting up a joint so he’d be famished before eating.
Dim is 2024’s most thrilling yet polarizing breakout rapper, with a runaway-freight-train flow and a killer ear for mad-scientist beats. Within the last few months, he’s ascended from obscurity to tens of millions of streams, racking up diehard obsessives as well as a hate-army that dismisses him as a meme rapper. He’s about to embark on a national tour across 15 states.
His abrasive music and persona feel purpose-built for this feverish era of online posting. He’s become infamous for inane antics, like livestreams where he crashes a bike into piles of cardboard for no reason and reads Dr. Seuss’ Green Eggs & Ham aloud in a snack shop. In his music, he jokes about peer pressuring his friends into smoking weed and being so dehydrated he can’t run, over bass blares that conjure up Chernobyl reactors imploding. Since picking up steam in January, he’s been a fixture of rap shitpost pages like Underground Sound that chronicle his every move and meme him to oblivion. In February, Hyperpop Daily ranked Dim first place in their “Underground Power Rankings,” which is basically the hyper-online rap world equivalent of having your face plastered on a massive neon billboard in Times Square.
In person, Dim is just as frenetic. He’d rather tell me about his favorite outdoor activities (mountain biking) and Taco Bell order (3 Doritos Locos and a Strawberry Wild Freeze) than discuss musical inspirations. He happily divulges his personal quirks—he hates pizza, never plays music while driving, and likes to have sex with all his clothes on. He tells me he’s into PinkPantheress; I ask if he’s tried to slide in her DMs and he gets a bashful look on his face.
Eating next to him felt like witnessing the most eccentric food critic. He offered a stream of reviews in his deep yet spry Southern twang—imagine Young Nudy mixed with the very excited tone of a kid on a field trip. Pork bun? “This a cloud, this a cupcake, this shit good as fuck.” Hot ‘n’ sour soup? “It ain’t really that bad, I was just looking for something else.” Scallion pancake? “Them shit nasty... It ain’t nasty, but it ain’t taste like nothing but bread.” By the end of the meal, Dim was crumpled over the table, head resting on his hand. “My damn stomach hurt,” he groaned, before jolting up and saying he was just joking.
Dim’s rapid rise came with a swift backwash of backlash—oldheads saying he’s ruining hip-hop, Redditors trashing his music as “ADHD rap,” spectators questioning if he’s an industry plant. Lazer claims he was never fazed by the hate, and says people take music too seriously these days. They overthink how professional rap has to sound. “I don’t know what they’re looking for. [Rappers are] trying they best, and you don’t even have to try your best,” he said. “I don’t even think about shit when I rap.”
While Dim claimed that anyone can make a hit “without trying” as long as they “feel good in the room,” that’s obviously not true, since hundreds of people try (and fail) to blow up every day. What makes Dim’s music so hypnotic is its infectious rawness, the way there’s basically no mixing and the bass is often so broken it sounds like it’s desperately crying for help. He makes everything using the BandLab app, a free and stripped-back recording platform.
Set against a crowded field of artists sing-rapping and manipulating their voice no end—glitching it into shards, lacing it with melody-correction software—Dim’s tracks are enticingly unvarnished and spontaneous. Instead of sped-up nightcore or slowed-and-reverb remixes, some of Dim’s songs are so serrated that fans have created popular “edits” where the mixing is just smoother. “No latency, delay, reverb, Auto-Tune—I like how it’s just my voice,” he says. “I be trying to tell them all to use BandLab… I’m showing them that I use it so they can feel like they can do it.” He rarely plans out songs—all his lyrics and punchlines are off the dome. He also sometimes records in the car, driving with his knees on the wheel and phones in both of his hands.
Photo by Kieran Press-Reynolds
At a moment when the landscape is flooded with too-cool types and artists develop cult fanbases because of their inexplicable “aura,” this spontaneity gives Lazer a kind of janky star power. There's nothing pretentious or standoffish about him—he just acts genuinely strange sometimes. Many of the interviews (and Bachelor-style YouTube contests) he's done are endearingly awkward; he often doesn't seem to know what to say and just throws out whatever meandering thoughts enter his mind. This off-the-cuff goofiness makes him fun to root for.
His fame feels more like the result of a chain of unlikely events than nefarious industry orchestration. He found the instrumental for his early social media hit “fukk 26zombies” after spending all night trawling through “Glokk40spaz x Slimesito type beats” on YouTube. He met his main producer Goxan in the YouTube comment section of the murky beat that later became Dim’s song “Jokery.” (“I thought that shit was ass, bro, that was a throwaway beat,” Goxan told me, laughing.) He only recorded his first major viral song because he went on a Twitch reality show called Song Wars where he had to spin a wheel to decide what kind of “type beat” he’d use for a track; after hitting “Asian Rock,” he took the first beat he found from a YouTube search.
Plus, it’s not like Lazer popped out of nowhere. He’s been rapping since the second grade, when he lived in Cordele, a small town two hours south of Atlanta that calls itself the watermelon capital of the world. Lazer was inspired by his mother’s boyfriend, who set up a makeshift studio in their house to record raps, and a slew of popular and local Atlanta rap he heard on the radio. One of his idols was Lil Wayne. In the early days, Lazer said he would make music using two phones at once—one to play the beat, the other to record everything.
You can hear traces of his reckless current style in his older, even messier tracks, especially his tendency to ratchet up tension with sputtering ad-libs in the intro. “Since I was a little boy, I was always saying something to build up the first bar,” he said. “I used to say ‘fuck, shit,’ then I started saying ‘fawk.’” Every star vocalist has a signature tic, Lazer’s is his fuck—the way he delivers the expletive ranges from annoyed resignation to exasperated, squeaky freakouts. Instead of signing autographs, Lazer said some fans ask him to say “fuck” in real-life now.
Dim’s speedy trajectory has been mega-boosted by delirious data dumping. He constantly hurls out new tunes and hops on the most unpredictable array of weirdo production. He’s bounced over blistering beats that sample SpongeBob’s irritating laugh; malfunctioning digicore craziness that sounds like he’s been shrunken down and trapped in a smartphone; freakishly kinetic gabber that’s borderline excruciating. One of his managers teased that he was sent beats by the revered cloud rap producer Lusi. Maybe my favorite stuff he’s done is with the cosmic SoundCloud wizard KRXXK—baleful beats that make Dim sound like a villain in a futuristic video game. Whenever I mention a deep cut in Dim’s catalog (“deep” meaning older than six months), he gets a glimmer in his eyes, like he’s honored people know him beyond the popular hits. “You know what KRXXK is?” he gasped. “I thought his shit was cracked.”
For Dim, the beat is the most essential part of the music, even more so than his vocals, which he considers just another instrument in the mix. That might sound ironic since his voice is so intense, but he often chooses such ferocious beats that his delivery—bobbing and weaving between glistening rhymes with no hook, bridge, or break for air, just a perpetual stream-of-consciousness flow state—dissolves into the noise. “If the beat is good, I really can’t control myself. The beat tells me what to say.” He said there’s basically no such thing as an awful beat; there’s always something bizarrely beautiful to be found in it. “If the beat is bad, it’s like a little fucked-up tattoo,” he said. “I got so many fucked-up tattoos, they’re just artwork.”
Pulling up his sleeve, Dim shows me his favorite tattoo, which looks like Bart Simpson with the bubonic plague. He said he loves The Simpsons and has gleaned life lessons from it; he told me he used to be a prolific thief, but was convinced to quit after he randomly saw a Simpsons episode where a character also started stealing but then got caught. “I think that was a sign.” Cartoons and zoomer TV shows are a silly motif in his music, with titles referencing Diary of a Wimpy Kid and iCarly. The night before we met, Dim said, he greatly enjoyed singing the Disney classic “Party in the U.S.A” at karaoke. “I watched Hannah Montana big time, bro.”
Dim’s online reputation for slapstick humor clearly translates to his actual persona, but he said there’s another side of him that fans don’t see. “I always be mad, bruh. Real-life shit going on.” When Lazer starts talking about something serious, he pulls into himself a little, growing quiet. He said he has a two-year-old son that he can never see because the mother took him away and blocked Dim, for reasons unspecified. “I don’t get sad, it’s just fucked up,” he reflected. Yet nothing seems to truly rattle Dim, even the idea that his family only pretends to enjoy his music to his face. “They’re fucking with [the music]. They’re probably just faking it, though,” Dim said, exploding with giggles. “They probably don’t fuck with my shit for real, for real.”
After finishing the meal, we walk over to the boutique streetwear hotspot Unique Hype, stumbling through Chinatown crowds and dense traffic. They’re about to meet with an industry head at Alamo Records, but Dim wants to peep some clothing first. He thumbs through racks while his managers obsess over $100 bills taped on the wall with the signatures of celebrities who’ve visited the store. There are rappers like Juice WRLD and TV icons. “Playboi Carti, Kylie Jenner,” Dim’s manager Kim says excitedly, pointing at the wall. “...next, LAZER DIM 700!”
Photo by Kieran Press-Reynolds