iLoveMakonnen first built an online audience through his dreamlike and unhurried microphone style, well before Drake reworked “Club Goin’ Up on a Tuesday” into the 2014 single “Tuesday.” That track climbed to number 12 on the Billboard Hot 100, earned platinum certification, and earned a Grammy nomination for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration. The singer, rapper, and producer has since assembled a catalog of more than twenty mixtapes and EPs, highlighted by guest turns on the gold singles “I Like Tuh” with Carnage in 2015 and “I’ve Been Waiting” with Lil Peep in 2019. After earlier affiliations with Drake’s OVO Sound and Warner Records, Makonnen issued his first proper album, My Parade, in 2021; Summer ’22 and the Stay Hydrated EP followed in 2022.
Makonnen Kamali Sheran spent his earliest years in Los Angeles before moving to the Atlanta area at age thirteen. By his late teens he had absorbed a wide range of musical styles. Recording alone, he began posting tracks on MySpace and conducted interviews with artists and public figures for his own blog. In the opening years of the 2010s he released numerous mixtapes, among them the initial volumes of the Drink More Water series. Miley Cyrus raised his profile in mid-2014 by sharing an image of the just-issued I Love Makonnen EP on Instagram. Drake’s involvement proved more consequential: the rapper joined a remix of “Club Goin’ Up on a Tuesday,” which OVO Sound released in September via its Warner distribution arrangement. Retitled “Tuesday,” the song reached number 12 on the Hot 100 two months later and was certified platinum around the time of its Grammy nomination. The parent EP, polished for commercial release by OVO Sound in December, entered the Billboard 200 at number 72.
While still with OVO Sound, Makonnen delivered the charting follow-up I Love Makonnen 2 in 2015 and appeared on Carnage’s gold single “I Like Tuh.” By the close of 2016 he had also put out Drink More Water 5 and 6 plus the Rich the Kid collaboration Whip It Kid. Drink More Water 6 became his first project issued directly through Warner Records; assorted self-released material followed before he returned to the label in 2019 with the M3 EP, which featured Gucci Mane on “Spendin’.” That year he also returned to the Hot 100 as a featured artist on Lil Peep’s “I’ve Been Waiting.” After a relatively quiet 2020, Makonnen surfaced on a new independent label in April 2021 with My Parade, his debut album. The Monster in the Woods EP arrived later the same year. In 2022 he released singles such as “Plastic” and “All My Shit Is Stupid,” the latter featuring YoungBoy Never Broke Again and appearing on the full-length Summer ’22. The year 2023 brought Diamonds, a previously unreleased collaboration with Lil Peep that stands as the final full project from the Swedish-American emo-rapper who died in 2017.
