Bryan Lamar Simmons was at the Fort Lauderdale airport when a gunman opened fire in January 2017. He lost his laptop in the chaos, ran onto a plane, and made it back to Atlanta. When Lil Uzi Vert called asking for beats, TM88 went back to his hard drive, rebuilt what he had lost, and pulled out an old beat he and JW Lucas had been sitting on for a while. That beat became "XO TOUR Llif3." It peaked at number seven on the Billboard Hot 100, earned Diamond certification from the RIAA in December 2022, and accumulated over one and a half billion streams across the major DSPs. The producer behind it is still, somehow, a name that requires explanation.
TM88 is a lead member and co-founder of 808 Mafia, the Atlanta-rooted production collective that came into formation around 2010 out of the Brick Squad camp alongside Southside and Lex Luger. The crew's fingerprints are on the last 15 years of rap in ways that are almost impossible to fully account for. Within 808 Mafia, TM88 occupies a specific lane: he is the one who figured out how to make trap feel like an interior emotional state. Genuinely haunted. That quality separates his body of work from the rest of the collective's considerable output, and it is exactly what melodic trap needed to become the dominant form it is today.
The early 808 Mafia credits read like a map of Atlanta's ascent. TM88 and Southside arrived as beatmakers for Brick Squad, coming up in the wake of Lex Luger as the production team behind the city's street rap soundtrack. They racked up placements with Waka Flocka Flame, Gucci Mane, Future, and 2 Chainz. TM88 met Young Thug through that same circle, and the relationship produced some of the earliest evidence of what his production could unlock in a melodic rapper. "Danny Glover" in 2013 gave Thug his first real national moment, a track that showed what happened when a producer gave an experimental vocalist a beat with genuine atmospheric weight behind it. The song gained traction through Atlanta radio and club play, and when Kanye West was spotted rapping along to it at a Been Trill afterparty in Paris during Fashion Week in January 2014, the whole industry took notice.
By 2016, TM88 was working at a pace that most producers cannot sustain. He co-headlined "TGOD Mafia: Rude Awakening" with Juicy J and Wiz Khalifa, a full collaborative album that proved he could hold a project together. That same year, he was responsible for several tracks on Young Thug's "JEFFERY," an album that pushed melodic rap's emotional range further than almost anything before it. Then came "XO TOUR Llif3." Co-produced with JW Lucas, the track arrived in 2017 and did something that very few records manage: it created a new emotional register for the genre. The beat is built on a descending piano figure that feels like a memory collapsing on itself, layered over trap drums that hit with physical weight. It gave Uzi a container for a kind of grief that his more celebratory records could not hold. TM88 has said he heard the song back on bad speakers and thought it was not working. He was wrong. "XO TOUR Llif3" became Lil Uzi Vert's signature song, and its emotional DNA runs directly through everything Rod Wave, Polo G, Lil Durk, and the entire melodic wing of the genre have built since.
What TM88 proved, across that run, is that the producer's job in melodic trap is emotional framing. The beat tells the listener how to feel before the first word lands. That is a specific skill, and TM88 has demonstrated it across a discography that touches almost every major name in the genre. Credits with Migos, Drake, Travis Scott, Moneybagg Yo, and Gunna sit alongside the foundational work with Future and Thug. The 2021 collaborative project "Yo!88" with Pi'erre Bourne showed him still finding new creative territory, and 2025's "F.I.L.A 25," titled Forever I Love Atlanta, is a direct statement about where he sees his place in the city's lineage. Grammy nominations confirm the industry knows what he is. The casual listener, the one streaming "XO TOUR Llif3" for the hundredth time, probably still could not tell you who built the feeling underneath it.
That gap between recognition and influence is exactly what makes TM88 worth understanding on his own terms. The melodic trap sound that defines this entire era, the Auto-Tuned croon over atmospheric drums, the beat that holds heartbreak and street life in the same four bars, needed someone to figure out that the production itself could carry emotional information. TM88 figured that out early, built it into his process, and gave it to every artist who came through the studio. The beat he rebuilt from memory after a shooting at an airport, the one he had been sitting on for months before Uzi called, turned out to be the clearest proof of a career-long argument. The feeling was already in the music. It just needed the right voice to find it.
