Photo by Julien Galan
We spend an afternoon with alt-rap phenom redveil, learning about the years of experience that went into his 2025 LP, 'sankofa.'
BY Yousef Srour
“How do I take this foundation that I built and bring it to a place that’s a little more reflective of how I want to exist musically?”
At 21 years old, redveil is cool, calm, and quietly contemplative by nature. Two weeks before the release of his first full-studio album, sankofa, he’s tense. As I’m pulling teeth in the San Fernando Valley at a pie place made for white millennials (which neither of us are), redveil is tearing at the white paper sleeve of a drinking straw. He’s clearly wary as I begin my inquiry into his early life in the DMV and various personal questions about his immediate family.
I had listened to the album a few times already, but sitting in front of him, the recordings seemed more like scabs than fully-healed wounds. The image of his past is raw, tinged with beauty but weighed down with brute realities and anxieties about what the future holds. He’s apprehensive to share more than what he had painstakingly decided to include in the lyrics. He’s actively coping with complex feelings towards the diaspora, imposter syndrome, and his brother’s mental illness. For the three and a half years since the release of his last full-length album, learn 2 swim, sankofa has been his eleven-track attempt at musical therapy.
redveil probably would have worked on the album forever had his team not cut him off. Sitting at the table with us, redveil’s manager, Rayan Falouji, clarifies: “It got to a place where he was like, ‘I could keep tweaking knobs and doing this and that,’ but it was just going to be minor adjustments.”
Born Marcus Morton, redveil is the youngest of three brothers, raised in Prince George’s County, Maryland. He grew up in a religious Caribbean family, splitting time between his Jamaican mother and his Kittitian father. He lived with his mother mostly, and spent the majority of his adolescence with his older brothers, skating at Allen Pond Park and playing NBA Street V2 and Grand Theft Auto with his siblings. His first favorite songs, “Chasing After You” by VaShawn Mitchell and "Never Would Have Made It” by Marvin Sapp, would play during car rides with his mom and on Sundays at their Seventh-Day Adventist church, a mainly Caribbean congregation, where he would fall in love with gospel standards and Kirk Franklin’s Praise SiriusXM channel. At home, his brothers were introducing him to Arcade Fire-era indie rock; blog-era hip-hop like Chiddy Bang, Mac Miller’s K.I.D.S., and early Odd Future shock rap; and the Go-Go version of “Lay It Down” by Lloyd.
redveil has fond memories of his younger years, nostalgic for the past and almost at peace with how the future turned out. When he thinks back to his relationship with his brothers, he tells me: “It was very precious. We were really close when I was little.” Gathering the words, thinking back and staring into the void, he pauses for a minute before confirming to himself, “We laughed a lot.”
sankofa is heavily informed by one of his brothers’ paranoid schizophrenia, but in-person, you can tell it was a touchy subject; the pain is still fresh and the grief of that volatile relationship is an ongoing battle. He’s rightfully reserved about the topic, speaking vaguely: “I’ve had more appreciation for the past lately, just getting older and being able to really see the beauty in it.”
Born to two creative-minded parents, an entrepreneur as his mother and a photographer as his father, redveil tells me, “I never had any limits with how I view my own future.” It immediately clarifies his early creative ambitions. He describes making his first song at the age of 8, messing around on the Garage Band app on his iPod Touch, producing a track with a kick, snare, and a piano, all apparently offbeat, but “it was adorable.” By the time he was 11, redveil would start using Windows Music Maker to make beats by splicing dubstep loops together. His curiosity was unbound. “If I discovered I had curiosity about a thing, I’d explore it immediately and have fun with it,” redveil underlines to me.
He was making skits and Minecraft videos and his own intro visuals for YouTube videos, but it wasn’t until the summer of 2016 that he began to rap. At the age of 12, he was producing his own songs, making beat tapes, and through his friendship with Ka$hdami (who found his own success in the industry with his hits “Look N The Mirror!” and “Reparations!” in 2021), he wrote his first verse. He was resourceful, and with the entire digital world at his fingertips, he began applying the fundamentals he learned from a couple of Busy Works Beats’ YouTube tutorials that “taught everyone under the age of 20 how to make beats on YouTube.” He learned the basics, but he preferred to teach himself through trial-and-error and producing for the sake of creation. redveil’s influences range from legendary producers such as 9th Wonder and Tyler, the Creator to the pioneers of the Soundcloud-era, from Ronny J and The Virus to the Antidote. He was particularly fond of the platform’s lo-fi hip-hop scene, with producers jinsang and bsd.u carving his love for DIY beats and minimalist soundscapes.
Around 2019, still only 15 years old, redveil would officially adopt his stage name in the summer going into his junior year of high school—the last year of him going to school in-person, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic. He says the name itself is meaningless, but it’s a way for him to keep himself grounded: “I look at it as a piece of my entire creative brain. I think I have a little bit of distance from it in my brain.” He continues by explaining that “it’s interesting because it’s not a character but it is a project. It’s an exercise.” redveil is portraying himself on his own terms.
When redveil thinks back, he recalls that “the time periods before and after COVID are like night and day for me.” Within the first week of the pandemic, he released his song "Soul Food,” which recently reemerged as his most popular song. Five months after debuting “Soul Food,” and nine months after releasing his first project, Bittersweet Cry, redveil would release his second album, Niagara, on August 25, 2020. Reflecting on Niagara’s almost instant success, redveil explains: “It was really surreal because something happened with that album that hasn’t happened for a lot of people in the past five to ten years, which is being a relatively unknown artist and then putting out a whole project and people finding that project within the week of it coming out.”
The dilemma with finding success so early is that while redveil is certainly happy to have found an audience, perception now hangs over his shoulders. “People caught me in a very specific part of my life where I was really getting into making that kind of music, like the drumless loops shit. That was one section of this entire musical identity that I had and that I wanted to show to the world,” redveil explains. Songs like “Weight” and “Campbell” would set the tone for his image in the underground rap scene, using drumless loops and FL Studios to create a new kind of chicken soup for young old souls and old heads with a taste for something new.
From that point on, redveil’s question became: How do I take this foundation that I built and bring it to a place that’s a little more reflective of how I want to exist musically? He would open for AG Club on their 2021 FUCK YOUR EXPECTATIONS tour, performing his first live shows as an artist born online. redveil recounts, “We went to Minneapolis, that was the first date, and I remember, at that point in time, that was my first time actually performing onstage. I did two songs and I was about to collapse. I had a lot of uncontrollable adrenaline, and I didn’t know how to manage it and space it out.” His second-ever performance would be at Lollapalooza that same year, forcing him to dive headfirst into the spotlight before properly introducing himself to the world.
On his 18th birthday, April 20, 2022, redveil responded to his rhetorical question with the release of his third album, learn 2 swim. He combined loops with original compositions, and it became clear that, “[the answer] looked like having sampled songs on the next album, but also having live saxophone and stuff like that, where I got to just show my love for jazz and sing on more songs and stuff like that, while still being able to keep that rawness and grit that Niagara had and that people thought was intriguing. I was trying to figure out how to strike that balance.” The result was a more free-form project that showcased both his ability to elevate lo-fi production techniques and his increasingly introspective nature as a storyteller.
Barely legal and with three albums under his belt, redveil found himself with underground success and more creative freedom than ever. In 2022, he would tour with Freddie Gibbs and Denzel Curry, and by spring 2023, he would embark on his first headlining tour in support of learn 2 swim, before collaborating with Danny Brown and JPEGMAFIA on “Kingdom Hearts Key,” the standout song from the duo’s joint album, SCARING THE HOES.
In 2024, finally escaping his teenage years, redveil moved from the DMV to Los Angeles. No longer physically confined to his past, he had nowhere to travel but inwards. Where his first three albums would acknowledge his coming-of-age and flaunt his creative exertion, staying afloat in Maryland as drumless hip-hop’s youngest protégé, outside of Prince George’s County he had to come to terms with a few key questions: Who is redveil? More importantly, who is Marcus Morton?
When redveil was 17, he would see sankofa everywhere and take pictures when he would witness the interconnected heart symbol welded into gates and fences and windows, an image of a bird with its head curved backwards and its feet facing forward. He illustrates, “I was drawn to it and I started making more specific and intimate connections to that concept through different experiences and emotions that I had as I was making this album. The more I made this album, the more I learned what that meant.”
As he began working on his latest record, the Ghanaian principle of sankofa began to take on a new meaning for redveil. He explains that it had been “something that used to always intrigue me before I fully knew why, before I assigned any superspecific personal meaning to it.” The emblem is meant as a reminder to “go back and get it,” to learn from the past while moving to building a better future. redveil tells me of the dissolution of his ego, and how for him, sankofa, is “the importance of remembering that my existence and everything I’m on this Earth to do, is part of an ongoing story and conversation with my ancestors and the people to come in the future.”
As a result, redveil’s fourth album is what he would candidly describe as a “very overdue uncovering of the self.” The eleven-song project explores and unpacks diaspora, the reclamation of redveil’s faith, and the multiple generations of his family that he grieves, from his ancestors to his immediate relatives. While developing the project, he went to St. Kitts for the first time, allowing himself to focus on his own lineage. He emphasizes to me that every month he worked on the project, the closer he would get to sankofa’s artistic statement. Like the bird embedded in Ghanian gates, Redveil had to go back into the past to “retrieve a firm sense of self and identity.”
As an artist and adult, he was at his first major crossroads in life. “I had many opportunities to go in whatever direction I wanted to and reinvent myself,” he elaborates. “I started to make money for the first time, I started to travel, I started to see different stuff. That’s the biggest thing I was going back for.” sankofa actively captures Redveil as he makes amends with the past so that he can continue to build a better future, bigger than the DMV and more than just hip-hop.
As we wrap our conversation, I ask him what he has since learned from finishing his fourth album—a project that was made with more freedom and more resources than ever before. “Through the process of this album, I went in a lot of directions in the earlier stages, just for the sake of due diligence, but where I ended up landing with everything was a story and a sound that I think I was being called to since the beginning of the process,” he explains. “Trust that and see it through until it’s thoroughly completed. No breaks. Just keep it going.”
Strangely enough, his response mirrors something he repeated to me earlier in our conversation, a lesson that his mother had ingrained in him since he was young: “If a task is once begun, never leave it until it’s done. Be a labor great or small, do it well or not at all.” He distinctly recounted this while knocking his knuckles against the wooden table in rhythm with the words.
It is redveil’s mother who appears on the album’s final track, “glimpse of you.” She closes the album with the Biblical story of a man with schizophrenia, tormented by the voices in his head, living alone in a cave, contained by chains and called a demoniac by his community. In the story, the man breaks free from his shackles and, the next day, is found sitting quietly and in his right mind. She finds hope in this story, returning to it whenever she loses faith in her son’s—redveil’s brother—ability to get better. In sankofa, redveil, too, finds hope. In self-expression, in family, in music.
Photo by Julien Galen