With Lil Bibby (right) and G-Money (center) in Chicago in 2018. I got diagnosed with attention deficit disorder in fifth grade, which I completely disagree with - how can you tell a little fucker in fifth grade he’s got ADD? How they supposed to act, like a Harvard scholar? I was bored.” “But certain things about school turned me off. “My whole family is smart,” stresses Juice today. Young Jarad was intelligent, scoring a more-than-respectable 30 on his ACT. Growing up in Chicago in the early 2000s, Jarad Higgins and his mom, a student teacher, moved all over the city’s far South Side and suburbs, in part to find a school where he wouldn’t misbehave. As he starts to play his new songs, Juice delivers brotherly monologues to his Instagram livestream: “Be blessed. His girlfriend, Alli, wanders in and out, curling herself behind him on the lounge chair like a baby animal preparing to hibernate. He also exudes a maturity that he attributes to growing up around older cousins, which is good, because people depend on him these days wrapping up a FaceTime call with a childhood friend, Juice quietly promises to Cash App him a little money. Juice WRLD Announces 'Death Race for Love' Album Releasing in March “Like, Kelly from The Office is holding on to her sophomore year in high school.”) (“You can look at people and know they’re holding on to some shit,” he says. Instead, Juice is warm, goofy and quick-witted, unleashing a wry stream of observations on screamo bands, Lil Wayne, organized religion, viral pornography of the mid-2000s and The Office.
New cats that look like they’re going to have some longevity.”Īrriving at Juice’s house, I half expected to be greeted with sullen indifference, the de facto attitude for artists who hit the big time before they can legally buy a beer. “But you try to find those career artists: Who’s going to be the next Drake, the next J. Cole, the next Kendrick Lamar? Right now, we’re seeing the new generation - your Juices, your Lil Uzi Verts, your Post Malones. “Of course labels try to sign acts that might be hot, because it’s a business at the end of the day,” says Aaron “Dash” Sherrod, the Interscope vp urban A&R who has been working closely with Juice over the past year. Last year may have been the craziest one of Juice’s life, but as his team tells it, it’s only going to get crazier. A few days after we meet, he’s off to Europe, having replaced Future on Nicki Minaj’s current world tour, and after that, he’ll kick off his own headlining tour. Steve Cannonīut Juice and Interscope want the world to know he’s bigger than his biggest hit, with his second album - due March 8, with the perfectly melodramatic title Death Race for Love - as proof. “And from what I’ve been told, I’m pretty sure it saved some lives.”Īt his home studio in Los Angeles in 2018. “That song got me where I am today,” says Juice. But the track became arguably the biggest SoundCloud-to-mainstream crossover yet. Maybe it’s thanks to the bridge (a snippet of perfect pop-punk), or maybe it’s producer Nick Mira’s reworked sample of Sting’s “Shape of My Heart,” which Sting himself called “a beautiful interpretation” (before collecting a hefty percentage of the publishing). “And that’s what ended up happening.”Ī tale of betrayal by a girl who has moved on, “Lucid Dreams” has the kind of raw, emotional edge that stands out against the gloss of the pop charts that it has come to dominate. “When we first heard the music, we knew it was going to be massive,” he says. But when I ask Interscope executive vp Joie Manda if the gamble has paid off, he simply laughs. Records signed Lil Pump in an $8 million deal.) When he signed, Juice had performed in public a grand total of once, when he overcame some serious nerves to play a party for his classmates at Homewood Flossmoor High School and collected a fee of $100. (The week Interscope signed Juice WRLD, Warner Bros. Three million dollars was a big bet on an unproven artist, even in the context of the SoundCloud-rap gold rush of the last two years.
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“I didn’t know how to process that shit.”
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“I went from sitting on the couch in my mom’s house watching TV to being in Los Angeles around all these big people, being able to record any time I want,” he says, kicking back in the billiard room-slash-recording studio while two of his cousins shoot pool and his engineer fiddles with waveforms. Today, dressed in a hoodie and shorts, Juice could be mistaken for a regular guy if it weren’t for his wristwatch, which gleams with what he says is a quarter of a million dollars’ worth of diamonds.