Baby Keem has opened up about his reasons for pausing his music career for five years following the release of debut album, The Melodic Blue.
Keem, who released his sophomore album, CA$INO, in February, revealed to Highsnobiety that a past ailment caused him to take a break from music just as he was getting started on a mainstream level.
"I’ll never be super public about what it was because I don't want that to be the narrative," the 25-year-old explained. "Going through that was the hardest setback for me. You have all these [moments] where you're like, 'Damn, I really won’t make music ever again.'"
Keem added that he deactivated his X account to avoid seeing unwarranted opinions about his disappearance and demands for a new album. "I didn’t need to see people telling me to release when I physically could not make music for a year," he said. "I had to learn how to do it again. It really fucked me up to where I didn’t want to go outside at all."
While Keem didn’t specify his health problems, in a April interview with The New York Times, the pgLang rapper spoke openly about once living in a group home and his late grandmother being his legal guardian due to his mother suffering from drug addiction.
In 2022, one year after dropping Melodic Blue, the Grammy winner was a supporting act on Kendrick Lamar's Big Steppers Tour. This past April, Keem returned to the stage for his third headlining tour, The CA$INO Tour.
