TAPZ is only 23 years old, but his bio already reads like a music industry veteran’s. Born in a rural area of Zimbabwe, he moved to New Zealand when he was 10, where he started taking music seriously at a young age. He knew that he had to eventually move to the U.S. to reach the audience he wanted, so for years he went back and forth between New Zealand and Los Angeles. On his first trip to New York City, things felt different. “For the first time I felt some sense of home in the midst of the fashion and creative energy here,” he says.

His debut single, 2015’s “Killa,” reached No. 3 on Spotify’s Global Viral charts, and soon after he caught the attention of G.O.O.D. Music and worked with G.O.O.D. Management from 2016 to 2018.

Now he’s based full-time in New York, building a new creative team while he preps a couple of EPs and a debut album. The timing feels perfect for his worldly perspective and genre-mixing sound, plus he’s already got more experience—both in life and the music industry—than most established artists. And he hasn’t even released a debut