Dro Kenji

South Carolina rapper Dro Kenji fuses the rapid-fire energy of online-born rap with the moody depth of sounds that shaped his youth, including Radiohead and XXXTentacion. Still a high school student at the time, he started uploading original tracks to the internet and soon came under the mentorship of the Internet Money collective, whose producers and artists guided him toward his first studio album, Eat Your Heart Out, issued in 2021. Additional projects such as With or Without You arrived the following year.

Raised in the quiet Summerville community of South Carolina, Kenji first explored music creation during his teenage years. Parental playlists heavy on classic hip-hop and R&B combined with the scores from countless video games to form his earliest influences. He quickly moved into writing, tracking, and posting his own compositions, with the initial efforts surfacing in 2017 as intimate, atmospheric lo-fi recordings made at home. Momentum built rapidly, leading to the 2020 mixtape Tears and Pistols, which marked a shift from unrefined beginnings toward a sharper emo-rap aesthetic. That same year saw the release of Race Me to Hell, after which the Los Angeles-based Internet Money team took notice. Under their production direction, he prepared material for the 10K Projects imprint, placing the earliest results on Eat Your Heart Out. F*ck Your Feelings came next, and With or Without You completed another full-length effort in 2022.