Honestly, who isn’t war ready, at this point? Or maybe you’re war weary. All things considered, with recent events and the State Of Things, I don’t blame anyone for being on the verge of either strapping up or checking out. But in the case of Rich Amiri, the 20-year-old rapper with the deep and distinctive flow, the timely title of his upcoming fourth album War Ready, out this Friday, is more personal than socio-political. It came to him as his biggest hit to date, last fall’s “One Call,” was blowing up, propelled by the rocket fuel that is TikTok traction.

“It was kind of like my first time being famous,” the artist born Amiri Chase recalls over Zoom in mid-November. “And I really wasn’t ready for all that. I hadn’t been exposed to that many people before. And I was seeing a lot of negative things being said about me. So, I feel like what ‘war ready’ means to me is like, internally being ready to combat that, you know? Just combat whatever life may throw my way, whether or not I’m prepared for it. There was just a time when, every time I would go on the internet and see my name it was something that was frustrating to me.”

If you think, he’s exaggerating, just try Googling “Rich Amiri hate.” What you’ll find is a flurry of posts on the usual platforms, but particularly YouTube, by young men with apparently a lot of time on their hands to take gratuitous verbal shots at one of rap’s most likable young stars. And the maddening thing is, the trash talk feels like grasping at straws. Some go after what they see as Amiri’s lack of “authenticity”; the extent to which he’s taken advantage of TikTok in his come-up; vigorous marketing on the part of his producers Internet Money. Citing old video clips, people even clown on his fighting ability in high school (seriously?). But most frequently, Amiri’s critics allege, with zero proof, that his eight-figure music streams – nine-figures, in the case of “One Call” – are “botted” and that his touted popularity is artificially inflated.

The truth is, Rich Amiri’s been on a steadily upward trajectory for the better part of five years, the writing and production on his records have only gotten more interesting – something that continues with War Ready – his numbers do continue to grow, and like other contemporaries, he landed on a catchy monster hit that took him to another level. Plus, he comes across as one of the most open and affable guys in music. So what gives? Could it be that underground hip-hop is just one of the most reflexively petty and shit-stirring spaces on the web?

“I feel like people are just like, lying?” Amiri says of his mouthy detractors who seem to like to hear themselves talk. “There was a point where people would just straight up lie. I mean, things that had no connection to the truth. It’s one thing if you take the truth, and you like, twist it in your own weird way? But there was a point in time where like I would look on the internet, and people would just make stuff up, from nowhere. And I had to train myself, to really not care about things like that.”

While it’s taken some doing, he has come to a more zen conclusion about it all. “I feel like hate Is always gonna be louder than love,” he says. “So I think that for me it was really easy to only focus on the negative, and ignore the hundreds, thousands of people that are coming to my shows, just to see me dance around on stage for an hour, you know?” In an interview earlier this year with RapTV, Amiri said the first lesson he learned when he got in the game is that “rappers are not your friends,” and called the hip-hop world “very high school.” While he declines to put anyone on blast who might have inspired that comment, and thereby “send them on a tirade,” he adds, “It’s very dog-eat-dog. I feel like the scene that people would group me in, if you were to see it back during like 2016, I feel like then it was very like, support everybody, everybody was working with each other and everything. But now I feel like it’s very dog-eat-dog.”

With War Ready, he should be able to take on all comers. Eighteen tracks make up Amiri’s most eclectic collection to date: swirly hybrids of trap, soul, and reverb (“I’m Gone,” “Oh Myy”); hazy rage with blown-out vocals (“U Like?”); and one track which borrows from the same decade-old Tame Impala track that once inspired Rihanna: “I sampled the song ‘New Person, Same Old Mistakes,’ so the title is kind of a spinoff, I called it “Same Ol’ Me.” The Kevin Parker original was a song that maybe not coincidentally wrestles with a desire to change artistically, just not too much. Amiri seems to be looking for a similar sweet spot of progress throughout War Ready. “I am definitely trying some new sounds,” he explains. “But I don’t think I’m taking chances. I feel like it’s gonna be received very well. I obviously have been experimenting, but I wouldn’t say it’s in a way where I’m not sure if people are gonna understand it. I’m very confident in the work.”

That “experimenting” is also evidenced in the fact that it’s taken about a year for War Ready to be ready, as the version that drops in a few days is actually the third iteration of the record – “Three completely different versions, with completely different tracks,” he affirms. Work on the first version began around the release of third LP Ghetto Fabulous in November of 2023. And while there have been breaks for touring – in April and May Amiri headlined the US and Canada, there were festival dates over the summer on both sides of the Atlantic, and last month he headlined European clubs – he’s been working and re-working the album throughout. What accounted for all the changes?

“It was a mix of everything,” he says. “It was a mix of like people around me, giving me their own pointers, and of me just not feeling confident with what I had. And also, it was what was going on in the culture around me, the sound. I just wanted to make sure the music sounded as current as possible and it didn’t sound like something that I was either supposed to be making years down the road, but also didn’t sound like something that somebody would drop like a year or two ago.”

In addition to his usual production team Internet Money, he also cites another collaborator who helped shape the record: producer Matt Cohn, who has worked with artists like the Weeknd, SZA, and Paris, Texas. “He did most of the melodies for this project, and he’s really like the main reason that the album sounds the way it sounds,” Amiri explains. “Because the album was in this like, semi-finished state, before I met him? But after we linked up and we started working, I was just, ‘Wow, like this song me and Matt made sounds really good. Ima swap it out for this song that we already have.’ And we ended up just replacing the entire project.”

He’s made some big strides in five years, the kid from the Boston suburbs who like many his age cut his teeth as a teen making music on a borrowed GarageBand. His formative years were the peak SoundCloud rap era, and the scene’s boldface names, Uzi, X, and Trippie all impacted him, as well as the late, seminal Southerner SpeakerKnockerz and the Atlanta godhead of Migos, Carti, Thug and the artist to whom Amiri’s vibe is most often likened, Future.

Amiri uploaded his first “real” song, “Me For Me” to SoundCloud in 2019, and more soon followed, with early tracks leaning into melodics and a more sentimental side, earning him a “PluggnB” tag that he’s found hard to shake, as much as he’d like to. By 2021 his singles came at a rapid clip, with “Walk In” an early breakout, and he won attention in part for his remarkably deep and singular voice. While he stands an impressive 6’ 4”, he has a youthful face, leaving some folks taken aback by his full-throated boom. (He sometimes shifts into a higher register when singing on tracks like the new album’s most melodic offering, “Touché.”) “Even when I first started doing music, I always got told that I have a very distinct voice, and that I sound like – whoever?” he admits. “But eventually it just started getting deeper and deeper, and here we are today!”

2022 saw the release of Rich Amiri’s first album For The Better, including a collaboration with SSGKobe, “Selfish.” He took a harder and more aggressive turn with verses about opps, fake gangsters, and “sending that boy to heaven” on a run of singles: “true colors,” “Havoc” – a collab with Slump6s — and “ruthless.” That same year, the rapper linked for the first time with Internet Money, the hitmaking collective founded by Taz Taylor, who along with lieutenants Rio Leyva, Nick Mira, and Thankyouwill oversaw Amiri’s next releases: 2022’s Chase EP, the duet “Poppin” with Internet Money icon Lil Tecca, and the 2023 albums Evolution and Ghetto Fabulous, released via Internet Money affiliate 10K Projects.

This year began as “all systems go” for Amiri, coming on the heels of the hundreds of millions of streams for “One Call” – the song generated a staggering 350,000 TikToks in its first three months of release and peaked at #60 on the Billboard Hot 100. But 2024 has had one controversial moment for the young rapper. What should have been another high-water mark – his inclusion in XXL magazine’s venerable Freshman Class issue – went sideways. A longstanding part of the magazine’s annual anointing of the most promising new talents in the game is a solo freestyle, as well as a cypher involving some fellow inductees. While Amiri delivered his freestyle, when it came time for the cypher, which saw him paired with Texan BigXThaPlug and Florida’s BossMan Dlow, the rapper bailed on the event.

When the issue dropped a month later, XXL editor-in-chief Vanessa Satten issued a written statement that read as a blind item, calling out an unnamed artist for ditching his cypher, alleging that he had claimed to be going to his car to “get clothes” and simply left. Satten cattily peppered the missive with Amiri song titles, calling the move “a ruthless way to conduct business” that “caused some havoc.” Amiri quickly jumped online to fess up to being the artist in question, while disputing the magazine’s account of how it played out, accusing XXL of “lying” in since deleted tweets. If it was not the best look from a PR standpoint, six months later, Amiri doesn’t regret his decision.

“Absolutely not,” he affirms. “You know – and if this becomes a headline, whatever – but I will say like since like 2016, I have only ever seen the freestyle be used to like, put people down. I have never seen anybody repost a freestyle and be like, ‘Wow, this person did so good.’ And I’m a very practical person. If there’s nothing to gain from doing something – why do it? You feel me, there’s people that have been on XXL and performed amazing freestyles, and nobody cares about that! Right? But the second that somebody goes on there and makes a fool out of themselves, that’s when it goes viral. So if there’s only a bad outcome to something, what sense does it make to do it?”

The XXL incident sparked a larger conversation the day after the publication, when rapper Lucki jumped into the conversation, effectively defending Amiri and calling out XXL for maintaining a practice that in the context of modern hip-hop, in which lyrical eloquence is not always paramount, might be anachronistic and destined to embarrass younger performers. In Lucki’s words, “It’s not no fucking young Nasir from Queens gon’ pop up. The fact that they still got them doing that, you obviously setting them up for failure.”

It is a valid question: whether or not freestyling, much less the ability to hold one’s own in a cypher, matters much to what it means to be a hip-hop artist today. In any case, by the time the culture joined that debate, Amiri had moved on. “I didn’t really care,” he says. “It wasn’t anything that was weighing too heavily on my mind. It was kind of funny, like me and my friends kind of joked about it, like, ‘Ha ha ha, look what XXL said.’ But it was never a thing like, ‘Aw man, people need to hear this! I got to be the one to…’ nah. It was never anything like that. It was really just a personal thing of – I’m a smart person. And I know when I’m being, I know what to do, and I know what not to do.”

After a few years of Los Angeles hotel-hopping, Amiri finally has his own place on the west coast. “My life is like a movie” he declares in War Ready’s “Oh Myy,” but he says he’s not a partier and rarely goes out to clubs, preferring to spend any free time in the studio. His formerly blonde locks are now back to black – “I was just thinking, you know, you can’t be ‘war ready’ with blond hair,” he laughs. And despite some of his raunchier bars – “She ride it like a porn star” he raps on new track “Stormi Daniels,” while on “I’m Gone” it’s “Got a famous girl/ I fuck her for the promo” – he says he has a steady girlfriend. “We’re in a pretty committed relationship!” he insists. “But I feel like, with those lines, you know, it’s hard to make a good line about your relationship! So there’s a little fabrication there.”

What you can take at face value is the opening line of “One Call”: “I don’t trust a soul, I don’t trust nobody.” It’s probably Amiri’s best-known lyric, and a testament to his wariness about the business. “I feel like, once you reach a certain status, some people get lost and start thinking everybody is their friends, but I quickly realized that you can’t trust everybody,” he says, adding with a laugh: “I have a very small circle that I trust, and if it’s 10 people, I am probably three of em!” And if there is pressure, after the platinum success of “One Call,” to equal or surpass that song or its accompanying album Ghetto Fabulous, Amiri says he’s not feeling it.

“The only standards that I feel like I really have to live up to are the standards that I make for myself.” he insists. “I personally think that this new album is gonna smash Ghetto Fabulous, like blow it completely out of the water? So that wasn’t even really a thought while making this. But I feel like if my main focus in creating an album was trying to surpass Ghetto Fabulous I feel like it would have sounded a lot different. But my main focus was just trying to make the best music possible, and in doing that I have no doubts.” As for those haters? In a way, he’s anxious for them to hear new record too.

“You know how you can like, record a clip of a person’s song, and use that against them, to say like, ‘Oh, this person is a bad artist?’” he explains. “I feel like you can’t really do that with my music. So that’s why I feel like a lot of those people have to like, find weird angles to be negative, when it comes to me. If that makes sense. So I’m very interested to see, with this specific record? You can’t say it’s bad music. I’m sorry, I don’t want to put myself up on too high a pedestal. But you can’t listen to it and say, “Aw man, this is just bad music,” or “This is generic music.” So I’m interested to see like – the people that already like, pre-don’t like me? I’m interested to see like what angle they’re gonna try to come at me with. But I’m also very excited to see how well the record is gonna be received!”

He’s not even 21 – that milestone will happen In February – and yet Rich Amiri is more than ready for War Ready to drop. What he calls his most “put-together” record to date has taken a year and a lot of changes to achieve, but he says doing it right was more important than doing it fast. “I will say that career-wise, I am the happiest I have ever been,” he concludes. “Just like, the visuals look so fire, and the music is so good, everything is just – I feel like nothing in my career has ever felt as cohesive as this project that I am about to put out. And nothing in my career has felt this real, if that makes sense? I’m just very proud of the work I’ve put in and I’m excited to release.”

And who knows? Maybe those haters will come around.

War Ready is out 12/6 via Internet Money/10K Projects.