OsamaSon is having a moment right now. The release of the South Carolina rapper’s frenetic third album, Jump Out, at the top of this year earned him legions of new fans and saw him break the Billboard 200 for the first time. It also spawned a 20-date US tour, followed by a 15-night jaunt around Europe that wrapped up last month (September 2025).

The crowd for one of those shows, at London’s KOKO, was overwhelmingly young, with thousands of teens and early 20-somethings duly responding to OsamaSon’s repeated demands to “open that shit up”, as rampant mosh pits met every brash, bass-boosted drop. “I still catch myself being worried before the shows,” the 22-year-old rapper, born Amari Middleton, admits over a video call from his current base of LA. “It’s cool seeing other people at their peak of happiness, though. There’s so much shit in this world that can make me happy, but there is no better feeling than going on stage to perform songs that I made and love, and seeing them make everyone else the happiest they can be.”

With an acclaimed album and extensive itinerary of live dates already under their belt, most artists would be content to leave their year’s work there and take some downtime. But OsamaSon isn’t most artists. Almost ten months on from the release of Jump Out, he’s just followed it up with the 17-track psykotic. A feverish collision of distorted 808s, fluorescent synth melodies, and the rapper’s carefree, Auto-Tuned warbles, it veers between fuzzy rage anthems – see “What’s Happening” and the Che-featuring “FMJ” – and lovelorn summer jams like “Get Away” and “She Woke Up”.

Though not necessarily a departure from his previous output, the rapper sees psykotic as a refinement of sorts of early mixtapes Osama Season and Flex Musix. “I didn’t wanna go back to them completely in terms of the sound, but I wanted to recapture the mentality and energy from those tapes,” he says. “I wanted it to have that first-listen feeling, like, ‘Damn, what is this?! This shit is crazy.’” Half of its songs, he adds, were sketched out while on tour earlier this year, as he sought to tap into the fervent energy he was putting out on stage every night.

OsamaSon’s story to date has earned him a near-cultish fanbase. An Instagram account, OsamaSon Fits, has been set up by one devotee to document the Rick Owens jeans and Enfants Riches sweaters that he’s often seen donning in various photos. “I fuck with all the fanbase,” the rapper says, adding that he always hooks the person behind said Instagram page up with free tickets whenever he’s in their town. “At the end of the day, they’re supporting me. Some people maybe take it a little too far, though.”

This brings us to the leaks. Over the past couple of years, obsessive fans and wily hackers – many of whom gather on the dedicated Osama Hub Telegram and Discord servers – have dug up everything from charming teenage videos and photos of the rapper on the school basketball team, to troves of unreleased tracks and unfinished demos. A 2024 spurt of 400 songs was followed by an eye-popping breach of 1000 more offcuts this past August. He was also forced to bring forward the release of Jump Out after the full album leaked online.

With the exception of a couple of psykotic’s tracks appearing online on the day of our conversation, no such misfortune has befallen OsamaSon this time around. This is partially since his label, growing ever-wiser to the leaks, insisted on sharing the record only via CD – complete with accompanying Walkman and earphones – with a select group of people. Pressing play on the portable device for the first time, it was difficult to discern to what level the clipping distortion heard on beastly opener “Habits” was down to my listening apparatus, or whether it had simply been baked into the track itself. A bit of both is the verdict having now heard the fully mixed and mastered cut through more standard means.

Perhaps another reason that psykotic managed to stay under wraps until its intended release date, though, is that OsamaSon continued to work on the record right up until the week it was unleashed. One last-minute addition to the tracklist was standout cut “yea i kno”, which the rapper had found stored among the hard drives he now uses to stack his hoards of unreleased recordings. “I’m still going through the problem of losing a lot of songs,” he bemoans. “I’m making so many that I think are super good, and they’re getting stored away and lost.”

Despite a relentless commitment to hitting the studio and working on his craft, there’s a playful, laid-back openness that radiates through OsamaSon. Immediately after lighting a fat blunt at the start of our conversation, he asks if he can smoke – of course, I respond. At one juncture, he breaks off from a point about social media to introduce me to his Bengal cats, Flexer and Storm. “Flexer is a one-of-one name,” he says. “You’ve gotta keep going hard with the names once you’ve got a cat called Flexer.”

Below, OsamaSon speaks to Dazed about minimising his social media usage, “clone” accusations, and his reasons for quitting the school basketball team.

This album cycle is going pretty well so far in that the record hasn’t leaked online to my knowledge, so that’s a significant improvement on what happened with Jump Out.

OsamaSon: I kinda deleted all social media, so I haven’t been keeping up. The only social media I have to have is Instagram, and I’m barely even logged in to my main account. I don’t know what’s leaked, and what snippets are going crazy. I felt like I had to take a break from that shit because I was driving myself crazy when I was really focusing on that stuff for my past albums. I was too caught up in other people’s opinions. I’m completely unfocused on that this time; I’m just focused on me.

I don’t feel like there’s gonna be a time when my shit isn’t leaking. I’m just trying to get used to it now and treat it as the norm. The leaks still mean people are interested in my music, so it all circles back to the art. I’ve just gotta deal with it – this is the life I’m given.

I wanted to address a video interview you did last year, where you were asked to write down some of the negative things people had said about you. One of the words was ‘clone’. Do you still see that word levelled at you, and does it bother you?

OsamaSon: I probably still do get that shit now, but that was around the time when I was really on the internet. I was looking at the comments and the DMs. I was letting that shit get to me. I didn’t really understand it, but now I do. It’s not even necessarily a diss. They’re not saying I’m a clone of a trash can.

I understand these people, though. I used to be a fan, too. I used to be in the shoes of a regular kid working a nine-to-five, listening to underground music, so I understand it. There’s some shit I don’t really understand, though, because I never took it far enough to abuse people’s [Instagram] Live or whatever. Some people thrive off hate. People make burner accounts to comment that negative shit, and they don’t even really feel like that; they’re just bored.

When you’re writing, you’re not sitting down putting pen to paper, right? It’s more just pure ad-lib and off-the-cuff?

OsamaSon: I haven’t sat down and written a song in years. Everything’s off the head. I mostly just freestyle and do one take when I’ve got an engineer. I don’t feel like there’s a need to write because when I hear a beat, I want to instantly hop on that shit. I don’t feel the need to sit there, wasting time, writing everything. You might perfect it that way, cool, but, for me, saying that shit off the head is how I’ma perfect it. When I’m making songs, they get better and better [as the studio session goes on], because I’m in that mode and I’m snapping. I’m in my head like, ‘What’s the next bar?’ I’m thinking ahead, you feel me? I don’t like writing.

I’ve learnt to take better care of my body: taking vitamin C, sea moss, ashwagandha, black seed oil, ginger shots.

You’ve been doing a lot of touring this year, and you’re just about to begin a 41-date run in the US. It must be challenging to keep the energy up night after night when you’re doing those long tours.

OsamaSon: I’ve learnt to take better care of my body: taking vitamin C, sea moss, ashwagandha, black seed oil, and ginger shots. I try my hardest to drink as much water as possible, because you’ve gotta stay hydrated. Sleep and hydration are the two key things to staying healthy on tour if you’re gonna do shows back-to-back-to-back. On my first US tour, I was super unhealthy and not sleeping enough. I got sick during and after it. On this most recent European tour, I got a little sick towards the end, but that was just because I was travelling so much. I was feeling fine every night, so that wasn’t a problem. There was a point in time when I was doing a lot of bad shit. I was drinking a lot of other shit, but definitely not enough water. I was fucking my body up.

You diversified the production on psykotic compared to Jump Out. wegonebeok executive-produced the latter and was responsible for 15 of the tracks on it. He’s only done two tracks on this one, and some of your other collaborators – like gyro, LEGION, Rok and Warren Hunter – have a bigger hand in it. Why is that?

OsamaSon: I wanted to drop Jump Out and get it out there for people to hear that and understand that I could do a lot of shit. I’ve been working with all the people who’ve produced this tape since Osama Season. Maybe there are a few who weren’t on there and are on this tape, but it’s mostly the same crew. It was super easy, because me, Rok, gyro and Warren did a camp deep in LA. We did a camp in this mansion with a pool outside for a week and some change, and we got everything right there. We got all the beats right, and tightened it up together. It’s super easy, because we’re all literally best friends. I talk to them almost every day. I consider them my friends before they’re my producers.

[Jump Out track] ‘Ref’ recently got used in a promo video by Denver Broncos. That must have been cool.

OsamaSon: That was lit. They told me the day before it went out, and I was like, ‘Woooah, what?!’ It was crazy. 

Did you play football at school?

OsamaSon: I played on the junior varsity team in my freshman year. I did it for one year, and then decided it wasn’t for me. I played corner[back]. I was locking shit up, but they weren’t putting me in.

You played basketball too, right?

OsamaSon: Hell yeah. I didn’t get any playing time on that too, though. That’s cool though, because in the basketball team, there were hella n****s better than me. They were my homies too, so I had no problem with it. I was just happy to be on the team. It takes a certain amount of skill to make the team. I quit basketball, because I decided it wasn’t for me. I wasn’t going to the NBA. I’m not trying to be running laps and doing all that crazy shit every day. I’m trying to chill, you n****s tripping. They’re talking about meetings after school, and I’m trying to go home and play Fortnite.

psykotic is out now

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