Skilla Baby

Detroit rapper Skilla Baby fuses gritty street narratives with polished beats to create tracks that land with equal parts polish and force. Guided early on by Sada Baby, he moved swiftly from self-released mixtapes and singles to local prominence and a 2022 Geffen Records deal that launched the EP We Eat the Most, later stretched into a full-length project. His 2024 mixtape The Coldest entered the Billboard rankings, after which he issued several singles, among them “Jwett.”

Born Trevon Gardner and raised in Detroit, he was already writing rhymes as a teenager, shaped equally by Meek Mill and Lil Wayne, the classic soul and R&B records in his father’s collection, and the poetry and literature of the Harlem Renaissance. When a hoped-for college basketball career fell through, he turned his attention to music around 2016, dropping the 2019 single “Trevon” along with the early mixtapes Push That Shit Out Skilla (2019) and Crack Music (2020), both of which earned regional notice. At that point fellow Detroit rapper Sada Baby took him under his wing, teaching him the industry ropes and steering his development. Continued output drew major-label interest by 2022, leading Skilla Baby to sign with Geffen Records for the EP We Eat the Most.

The following year he joined Tee Grizzley on the collaborative mixtape Controversy and paired with multi-platinum rapper G. Herbo on the single “B’CUZ.” Building on that momentum, Geffen expanded We Eat the Most with fresh tracks featuring BabyTron, Luh Tyler, and Rylo Rodriguez. Additional collaborations arrived with City Girls, Yung Miami, BM Riqq, and others before Skilla Baby issued the 2024 mixtape The Coldest, which included guest spots from DaBaby, Flo Milli, NoCap, Polo G, and more and opened at number 175 on the Billboard Top 200. Both the project and its deluxe edition were followed by further joint releases with SleazyWorld Go, Cartier, and 4batz plus the solo single “Jwett.”