Raury

Known for blending alternative folk with rap and electronic textures, the free-spirited Raury sings, raps, plays guitar, writes songs, and produces his own material. He shares common ground with contemporaries ranging from Chance the Rapper to King Krule and Lorde. The Atlanta-based artist delivered his first full-length commercial release, All We Need, in 2015. That relentlessly optimistic set climbed onto the Billboard 200 behind the lead single “Friends,” which featured Tom Morello. Raury later stepped away from Columbia Records to operate independently, issuing the comparatively hushed Fervent in 2019 and the funkier Strawberry Moon in 2022.

Raised roughly twenty miles outside Atlanta in Stone Mountain, Georgia, Raury Deshaun Tullis began tracking music while still in his early teens and performed with a high-school cover band. His 2014 graduation year proved especially eventful: he organized an eighteenth-birthday music festival called Raurfest, released the free digital-download mixtape Indigo Child, signed with major-label Columbia, and appeared on SBTRKT’s album Wonder Where We Land. Those early recordings, along with his ambition to forge not only a fresh genre but an entirely new culture, earned him a long-list nomination in the BBC Sound of 2015 poll. His debut proper, All We Need, arrived in October 2015. The project reached number 78 on the Billboard 200, propelled by “Friends,” while “Devil’s Whisper” and “Crystal Express” later emerged as standout tracks; additional guests included Big K.R.I.T. and RZA.

Raury resurfaced several years afterward as an independent artist with the primarily acoustic, ballad-heavy projects The Woods and Fervent, issued in 2018 and 2019 respectively. He continued to surprise listeners in 2022 with Strawberry Moon, a concise album that drew more heavily from R&B than from any other style.