“This shit sounds scary, doesn’t it?”
Yeat is blasting experimental trumpet music in his spacious Los Angeles lair as he looks out over dramatic views of the city.
Rumbling out of the expensive soundsystem is a 1977 recording called “Hex” by American composer Jon Hassel. It does, in fact, sound scary as hell, and Yeat can’t get enough of it. “This is insane,” he says, transfixed by the eerie horns.
He first heard the song in a luxury Tokyo clothing store, which sent him down a rabbit hole of avant-garde ambient music from decades past. Yeat rarely listens to popular new music these days, and he’d rather discover strange sounds in unexpected places.
If you spend any amount of time with the 25-year-old artist, you’ll notice he has a favorite phrase: “pushing boundaries.” It’s a mission statement, of sorts, for a guy who has long delighted in pissing off hip-hop traditionalists by making delirious moshpit anthems that stray far from the sensibilities of your dad’s lyrical rap collection. He’s a tinkerer—a curious innovator obsessed with finding unusual flows, inventing words, and figuring out outrageous new ways to layer his ad-libs into beats.
Yeat, born Noah Olivier Smith in Irvine, California, began his career as a leader of the high-energy “rage” rap movement that exploded from the underground in 2021, but he never wanted to recycle the same sound that made him famous. “If I just made ‘Monëy So Big’ 50 times in a row, I would be going nowhere,” he points out. With time, his music has grown a bit more melodic (“I've been getting more into my singing bag,” he says) and he’s been infusing new styles—from industrial dance music to rock to country—into his futuristic brand of hip-hop. (No wonder he spends his afternoons studying spooky ambient music.)
So far, it’s working. At a time when the hip-hop world has become increasingly anxious about a lack of new stars, Yeat is the rare exception. In the last three years alone, he’s landed six projects inside the top 10 of the Billboard 200 chart, and his cult fanbase has grown into a mainstream following that stretches across the globe. As we speak, “Comë N Go,” the standout hit from his new EP Dangerous Summer, is climbing to the top of the rap streaming charts, and the biggest artists in the world are taking notice. He’s collaborated with everyone from Drake to Young Thug to Donald Glover, and received co-signs from the likes of Justin Bieber and The Weeknd. The underground king has grown into a legit star.
In 2025, Yeat has arrived at a turning point. After five years of incessant music-making—dropping over a dozen projects and accumulating a massive vault of unreleased songs—he’s ready for a new approach. For the first time in his career, he’s going back and taking extra time to fine-tune songs, rather than making them in one take and dropping right away. He’s slowing down and perfecting his next album, A Dangerous Lyfe.
On a Wednesday afternoon in mid-September, he pulls his phone out and starts playing unfinished demos he’s been working on, revealing his most ambitious, expansive work yet. The music is anchored by an aesthetic that will be familiar to most Yeat fans, but it’s being executed at a scale (and with a level of precision) that he hasn’t reached before.
This creative progression is running in tandem with an even more dramatic physical and mental transformation over the past year. He started working out, cut back on drugs, and got in the best shape of his life. Throughout our afternoon together, he looks me straight in the eyes as he talks, speaking with an energy and clarity that wasn’t present when I first interviewed him for a Complex cover story in 2022. “I didn’t want to be out anywhere back then,” he says.
Perched on the edge of a couch in a lavish home that’s decorated with trippy paintings and vintage audio devices, Yeat speaks with excitement about the future. For years, he was happy to lurk from the shadows as he became one of the world’s most-streamed rappers without ever needing to play the typical games of celebrity (until recently, he rarely even showed his face). But in 2025, a new Yeat stands before us. He no longer relies on the masks that used to obscure his appearance, and he’s ready to move differently. He’s been stepping out more, linking with A-list peers, walking in fashion shows, teasing Nike collabs, and plotting a future that extends far beyond music.
As he prepares for a performance at ComplexCon on October 25, which will feature several surprise guests, Yeat sits down for a rare, in-depth conversation about his recently released EP Dangerous Summer and the next era of his life and career. The interview, lightly edited for clarity, is below.
How's life?
Amazing. I feel great. I've been in a different head space. I work out every day. I swim every day. I don't do percs anymore. I’m focusing on health and getting my mind straight. Now that I'm single, I've been in a different bag.
I'm mostly just working on music right now, but I've been trying not to go too crazy. My problem has always been making so much music over the years. I've made like 40,000 songs. The newest thing that I make is always my favorite song, so I've been dialing it back, because I don't want to over flood it.
I make so many good records, and I don't want to lose track of crazy hit songs by making a bunch of others that could be better. I forget about great songs all the time because I record at such a rapid pace, so I've been trying to slow it down. I always have records, though. I could drop a 20-song album tomorrow.
What does an average day in your life look like right now?
If I'm on the road, then I just wake up, chill, do a show, and go turn up. If I'm here in LA, I'll wake up, work out, make a couple songs, or be on the phone with some producers and listen to shit. I listen to a lot of melodies and then try to see which producers will put the best drums on it. And then just a lot of business shit. And girls. That's really it. [A large painting is delivered to his door while we talk.] I've got these paintings. I love art. I'm always thinking about things outside of music—like furniture, paintings, clothing, and movies.