Nettspend: An audience with the polarising new prince of trap

This article is taken from the spring 2025 issue of Dazed. Buy a copy of the magazine here.

Nettspend is about to introduce his son. The 17-year-old rapper’s A&R tells me to wait around the corner – he’s just “being prepared”. When he finally arrives, everyone here – the A&R, three of Nettspend’s homies – cheers. Everyone except Nettspend, who wears the same half-glum, half-asleep look as his son, who he calls Elijah. Elijah is no larger than a bottle of ketchup, his little ear around the same size as one of Nettspend’s bitten-down nails, his hand the size of the heart-o-gram tattoo on Nett’s thumb. His eyelashes flutter and his dark hair stands patchy on his head. He is swaddled up in his father’s arms, a white towel over his haunch. Elijah is a monkey. A tiny baby monkey that Nettspend, who now has access to everything he could possibly want, recently purchased as a gift to himself.

We are in the $8m mansion in north-west LA that Nettspend, whose real name is Gunner Shepardson, and his manager Nolan Riddle, a film director, have lived in for the past year. There is a full-scale elevator, movie theatre, gym, tennis court, 70ft cascading waterfall and swimming pool. None of which I’m shown. I’m only invited upstairs, which is about 5,000 sq ft of Gen-Z purgatory: grey vinyl flooring, nondescript coffee-table books, earth-toned modular sofas; the kind of thing you’d see on the first page of Wayfair. Other than three carefully placed bottles of Dom Pérignon on the side (next to a bottle of washing-up liquid), this space looks thoroughly unlived in, like a show home. The flatscreen TV still has its plastic coating. The modern LED lights are unsocketed. The only evidence of Nettspend up here is the smell of weed, which is so strong that it only takes a matter of minutes to infiltrate the system. Everyone here in the mansion moves and speaks in a strange tempo, one at least half a beat off from real life.

Nettspend, whose pearly hair is ombréd black, sinks into the terrible couch, swipes at a bag of Goldfish crackers and says some of his first words of the evening: “Goldfish are fire.” This is underground rap’s wonder waif, the paragon of quirked-up white boys. While we’re sitting here, thousands of kids are swapping tips on how to get their hair like Nett’s, uploading doodles they’d drawn of him in maths class, and going du du du with their guns on Roblox while they listen to Nett’s skibidi hip hop. Meanwhile, slightly older but still desperately in touch pundits are comparing Nett to Kurt Cobain. HBO has reportedly spent a couple of million dollars on a documentary about him. Universal has banked money on him.

What does he like about performing? “Performing.” How would he describe his relationship with his fans? “My relationship with my fans.” What does he see when he looks in the mirror? “Myself.” When, slightly panicking, I ask him: “What’s your favourite colour?” he gives a slightly more animated answer. “Blue, I like the feeling of it”

And for good reason: Nettspend is the sound of a world yet to be born. He is the portender for another round of oldheads to feel their cyclical drag into irrelevance. He and his endorphin-blasting, euphorically efficient music are a convenient lens into our era of brain rot and multiple screens and rizz and sigma and words millennials with Harry Potter symbols on their wrists have never heard. His first full-length, Bad Ass F*cking Kid, was a frazzled bildungsroman of the post-rage kind that became one of 2024’s most polarising releases. On it, he rapped like the brain unfiltered, speaking in a kind of jerky pidgin language that made instinctive rather than logical sense. While rappers typically deliver four-bar flows, Nettspend came with something like 3.5, finishing thoughts or contradicting them entirely on the next bar or the one after that. Working with producer OK, he couched his novel flow in an overdose of Auto-tune, turning the artificial ecstatic and sweetly dumb.

To say that Nettspend is difficult to speak to about any of this would be generous. His manager and A&R sit behind us, even more desperate for answers from him than I am, but the vast majority of his responses are tautologies. What does he like about performing? “Performing.” How would he describe his relationship with his fans? “My relationship with my fans.” What does he see when he looks in the mirror? “Myself.” When, slightly panicking, I ask him: “What’s your favourite colour?” he gives a slightly more animated answer. “Blue, I like the feeling of it,” he says, before sinking into the couch like it has the ability to make him disappear. This is how it goes for about an hour and a half. He always sounds as though he’s on the precipice of saying something brilliant. “I’m just thinking,” he says after several moments of heavy silence before tapping on his phone and letting the question die a slow and painful death. What’s on his phone? “Subway Surfers,” he says, then puts a hand to his forehead, covering his eyes, looking so weary I have to ask with genuine concern: you OK? “Yeah, I’m just chillin’.”

Nettspend is not chilling. He’s working on a single. Working is all he does. Tonight, right after this interview, he’ll fly to New York City to meet with some artists who will appear on the new record. “You know, girls, boys,” he responds when I ask him who he’ll be meeting. He tells me he plans to release the single – which is yet to have a title – on his birthday, March 18. That night, he’ll turn 18, hit up Dave & Buster’s and release his single. All of this is news to his label. I turn around to see his A&R looking vaguely horrified. Nett tells me he doesn’t yet know what the single is about. “I’m lost,” he says, before disappearing for around 20 minutes to eat Mediterranean food with his girlfriend who’s waiting downstairs. He blushed when I asked about her earlier, and smiled when I asked whether he was happy. “Very.”

They met on the set of one of Nettspend’s videos, his manager tells me while Nett’s away. When he returns, I try to learn more about his upbringing. Shepardson was born in Richmond, Virginia, in 2007, and so on and so forth – but it’s difficult to get a clear version of events from there on out. Like his raps, he talks about his life’s narratives in a series of contradictory, illogically connected spurts.

If I’m brought here for a purpose, then I want to help people, like, uh… I really hope it does something, like, for the youth, I guess. For people like me. For people who aren’t like me

He grew up on country music. His first concert was a band called Rainbow Kitten Surprise. His favourite movie is Martin Scorsese’s After Hours. He loves to skate – “that’s where I learned to connect with people”. He loves elephants. He drew elephants all the time in school, as well as “bad stuff”. His mum has an “ancient elephant” tattooed on her forearm. Nett tells me he was kicked out of his mum’s house once, his dad’s three times. “He chose to leave school, left Virginia, moved to LA and made a go of music,” his manager says.

Nettspend is even aloof about wanting to appear aloof. I’d always found it curious how someone at his level of fame still had all their old social media intact. His first Instagram selfies, his first tweet – “It’s raining money! I’ve got more than @ShaneDawson – Get yours! #BILLIONAIRE” – still there for everyone to see. “There’s no way to delete it,” he says. So you’ve tried to? “Nah”. His manager bursts his bubble once again: “Yeah, we also tried to delete his Snapchat the other day,” he says. “What are you talking about? No we didn’t,” replies Nettspend unconvincingly. Stuck, he then proceeds to offer a few genuinely revealing non-sequiturs. The first: “My dad missed my second birthday so he could go to a Willie Nelson concert. If I could meet anyone, it’d be Willie Nelson.” The second: “One time my dog bit the neighbour’s cat’s head off, that shit was crazy.” The third: “I think about death all the time; my own, the people I love.”

After that admission, he reaches back for the pack of crackers. “You know, I like Goldfish and I like… um... hanging out with my homies and shit.” Then he switches gears yet again, says something close to sincere: “If I’m brought here for a purpose, then I want to help people, like, uh… I really hope it does something, like, for the youth, I guess. For people like me. For people who aren’t like me.”

His manager brings him a concoction of Nutella, cereal and hot chocolate in a white ceramic mug which Nett greedily sips at. A single droplet of milk sticks to his lip for the remainder of the conversation. It is then very obvious I am talking to a kid, one in the process of growing up, nowhere near who he’s yet to be.

As our interview comes to a close, Nett hugs me and apologises: “I’m just awkward,” he says. Then he goes downstairs, takes the monkey in his arms, and tries to make him warm. His A&R tells me it’s time for me to go, Nettspend needs to record. I look into the monkey’s eyes with no better sense of where he came from or how he came to live in this mansion. The monkey looks back: full of inarticulable feelings, eyes glazed over, lost.