In one of those prewar apartment complexes on the border of Chinatown and the Lower East Side, the ones with ghosts whispering through the chipped radiators, Gabe ’Nandez is in his bedroom looking for an outfit. None of his laundry is done, though; he just got back home from rocking his best album yet, the medieval boom-bap of Sortilège (entirely produced by Preservation), as an opener on the GOLLIWOG tour of billy woods, his new mentor and Backwoodz Studioz label boss. Tonight’s homecoming show at the Knockdown Center in Queens will be one of Gabe’s biggest sets in more than a decade of rapping.

I’m killing time snooping around in his kitchen, which doubles as a living room, waiting for him to change. In the far corner is a mini office area where he works his overnight job as a customer service representative for a bank. On the floor are a bunch of philosophy books marked up like the first draft of a college paper. His walls are basically an artistic moodboard: Manga panels from the mythological fantasy Berserk; biblical symbols; Wu-Tang posters, Ka records, and DMX memorabilia; flags and knickknacks from across the globe (a nod to his nomadic upbringing, where he spent time in Haiti, Jerusalem, and Tanzania when he wasn’t in his homebase of New Rochelle); a collection of swords, knives, and Eastern instruments, including the bağlama he played on “Harmattan,” the intro to Sortilège.

When he comes out of his room, he’s wearing a pair of fitted Levi’s and a Darth Vader tee underneath a bomber jacket. “What do you think?” he asks, spraying himself with the amount of cologne you might before a big first date. “Do I look like a real rapper now or what?”

That might have been a self-deprecating joke, but in reality, that must be part of the pressure of getting your Backwoodz chain (there doesn’t seem to be an actual chain, but let’s pretend). The stamp of the vaunted independent hip-hop label—which has built a reputation among its community of fanatical diehards and like-minded rap geeks for its lyric-forward, anti-commercial approach—can bring new eyes to a rapper overnight. That’s the shift Gabe, who regularly tears up stages on random Wednesday evenings in the city, has been going through. He’s a Professional Rapper now. “It was the perfect storm of woods and Pres really believing in me with my fundamental skill just stepping up,” he says of his moment. “But I feel like Guts from Berserk; I was a mercenary outside fighting all the battles for so long that I earned this shit.”

To that point, Sortilège feels like the kind of album Gabe couldn’t have made without first living a lot of life. The way he balances lyrical surrealism with straightforward punchlines and tonal shifts between the apocalyptic dread of consuming the daily news cycle and casual hangout observations (bumping Styles P in Westchester; when he notes on “Morning Star” that he’s “in the club next to the bouncer, look like the bouncer”), captures the human complexities his writing has been striving toward.

With his tree-bark rasp, Gabe raps hard as hell and pulls little storytelling tricks out of his bag. Think “Muay Sok,” where his Muay Thai training sessions are so detailed that they could be outtakes from a Tony Jaa action flick, or “Ball & Chain” where he’s haunted by his past drug addiction. “I like getting the sense between light and dark in myself,” he says. “I think when someone has a drug problem and they manage to get sober they flip that energy that they spent destroying themselves and actually have the capacity to become quite exceptional. I just know myself so well now that I’m not afraid of being judged.”

Giving him that extra boost is the sampledelia of Preservation’s crate-digging mysticism. Pres, a veteran of the East Coast underground, became familiar with Gabe after hearing him rip a verse on billy woods’ 2022 album, Aethiopes. They connected and bonded over hip-hop and their Francophone identities, putting each other onto old French rap groups and talking about movies like Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 crime drama La Haine. They laid down a lot of the album together in New Orleans. “When I was in university and I first heard woods and Pres, I never thought I would be a part of that lineage, but it makes sense,” says Gabe. “Hip-hop culture is craving this well-written rap shit.”

As Gabe mentally prepares for the show tonight, he has a look of nervous excitement that I recognize from riding the bench on the high school basketball team. We hop on the J train to pick up 75 freshly pressed vinyl copies of Sortilège that woods has stored for him at a brownstone in Bed Stuy. On our subway ride he’s slightly anxious and keeping to himself; he later tells me one of the lasting effects of his past struggles is that he tries to avoid closed spaces when he can. He carries the boxes of records out of the house and is so eager to see how they turned out that he has to talk himself out of cutting them open on a rainy sidewalk. He waits until we’re in the green room of the Knockdown Center, running his fingers across the plastic seal of the vinyl like he can’t believe they’re real.

Spend enough time interviewing rappers and you’ll realize how much of their time is spent waiting. We sit in that green room for hours as artists within and outside of the Backwoodz orbit pop in to say what’s good to Gabe. Here’s Theravada and then Cleo Reed and then Bruiser Wolf waxing poetic on the No Limit classic Shell Shocked by Mac. Gabe loses his shit when he meets Vordul Mega of Cannibal Ox, who tells him that he fucks with his verse on “War.” Finally, Preservation swings in; they do a soundcheck and then, like a sage uncle, gives Gabe advice on how to price and move all the records. After a Backwoodz collective group pic, they head out to the stage for their performance.

If you’ve never been to a Backwoodz show, the people love the hell out of the crew. The enthusiasm reminds me of going to an Opium gig, except with no mosh pits and everyone seems to be an adult with a job. With Pres as the DJ, Gabe rips through damn-near all of Sortilège like a pro. As I navigate the spacious venue, there’s a few that know the words and many nodding along. In person, I notice how much bounce there is to the record, which I don’t always associate with Backwoodz releases, especially the ’80s East Coast feel of “Shadowstep,” heavy on everyman flexes with a satirical bite: “In New York, Toyota is foreign, I switch lanes.”

Afterwards, Gabe disappears. I look up and down the venue for him until I finally find him: Mingling and watching the rest of the show like any other fan.

If A$AP Rocky wasn’t too busy becoming a character actor (I stand with Yung Felon, Denzel was an asshole) and doing sit-downs with DJ Akademiks, he’d probably already have moved Pz’ into his crib like he did Carti a decade ago. Because Pz’ seems to be the obvious heir of the model rap crown; the only thing is that the music is just fine so far, not as much of a visible hip-hop nerd as early Rocky or as out there as Awful Records Carti. But the simplicity of “Bad Boys” is cool, with an effortless talk-rap swag and sharp ear for ATL psychedelia that reminded me of Key!’s laid back acid trips. More of this and I might think Pz’ is as much about the music as the photoshoots and Mowalola product placement.

In the middle of Kla$h, music video director Bill Parker’s low-budget 1995 mystery, there’s about 30 minutes of rowdy concert footage of clash star Mad Cobra and white Canadian reggae one-hit wonder Snow on stage in Jamaica. Surrounding all of that is Giancarlo Esposito as a magazine photographer who gets sent to the island to cover the performance (we used to live in a world with music journalism budgets), but gets mixed up with plotting crime syndicates through a femme fatale, played by Jasmine Guy in hilariously hokey patois. It’s sick. Lots of scenes of a sweaty Giancarlo drinking at bars, chilling on a boat, and thinking with his dick, as the roaring bass of the dancehall soundtrack starts to feel like an inescapable haze. I like to think this movie exists because somebody cut Bill Parker—who did videos for soul groups like Kool and the Gang and The Whispers—a check to go shoot a concert and he came back with a whole ass dancehall noir.

Part Shock G’s Humpty Hump and part Skrilla’s masked horrorcore, Burger Marty is the character of an anonymous Broward County rapper who wears a clown mask and a Haitian uncle get-up (down to the fake gut and Kohl’s Cash outfit). On his ridiculous kompa send-up “Bring Custo,” he weaves in and out of English and Creole and chants his favorite ad-lib, “Cheeseburger.” The rest of his lyrics he belts like the man at the party who’s downed too many bottles of Prestige: “Can you cook me some diri?”; “Damn, I miss my labouyi.” Funnily enough, the rest of his Behind the Mask tape is all Philly-style drill and South Florida scam rap with a sharp sense of humor. All he’s missing is a couple of music videos to really bring it to life.

Channeling the energy of a carnival barker, Krispylife Kidd, threatens to leave potholes in streets and not wipe his ass over the instrumental of Pac and Snoop’s “2 Of Amerikaz Most Wanted.” Amazing. Open the entire Death Row vault and let him go crazy.

Not gonna front, after the Premo collab album I thought Marci might have been checked out, but I was tripping. Like, c’mon, on the new one, he says, “Air Max 360 the sweats/Had 360 waves on my head for every brush that I had with death.” That right there is enough proof that Roc Marci rhymes are as timeless as Matthew Stafford’s arm strength.