At the start of 2025, Zaytoven felt uneasy about where Atlanta hip-hop was headed.
The scene he’d known was … in a rut. Both he and the city were in mourning, with how many key players and folk heroes had died in recent years, from Takeoff to Rich Homie Quan to Lil Keed. For the first time in perhaps its entire history, Atlanta’s rap scene didn’t feel like some renewable energy source.
All this uncertainty was, why back in January, Zaytoven hoped that Atlanta’s rap scene would get “back to fun, lifestyle, artsy type music,” as he told Atlanta Is…, a podcast produced by Will Packer Media and Complex. “It has to come back to a good place for it to really evolve.”
He wasn’t alone.
In 2025, Atlanta hip-hop—from scene veterans like Jermaine Dupri to newcomers like BunnaB—got real nostalgic for the late 2000s. Trap stars like Quavo and mall rats like Skooly and Young Dro made music that sounded playful. Mixtape DJs like Drama, Spinz, and Swamp Izzo reassumed their positions as scrappy master curators.
As for Zay, he was at the center of it all, from being sampled in the city’s biggest hit, to getting the call for 2025’s most ambitious release.
Carti and Metro Boomin embrace the late 2010s
The first sign of what was to come was from an unlikely source.
For as big as his music has gotten, Playboi Carti hasn’t always sounded at home in Atlanta. He has had this gripe since people poked fun at his “baby voice”: “I think that’s bullshit. I think people be forgetting I’m from Atlanta,” he told me in 2021. But with MUSIC, Carti made it his mission for people to remember where he came from. “WALK” reminds us that he and Bankroll Fresh got their start in music at the same time, and even the same stomping grounds, with its sample of Bankroll’s “Sydney.”
Carti also features DJ Swamp Izzo, who brings listeners back to when mixtapes still resembled party tapes in the late 2000s and early 2010s—but is also used to working with the sort of rap mavericks who people don’t “get” right away, like Young Thug with his debut mixtape series I Came from Nothing. Even as he brings the energy, Swamp Izzo becomes this grounding force in MUSIC as Carti’s own voice tears and seethes throughout. No matter how many times, or how many different ways Carti finds to claim Atlanta’s Southside in his lyrics, Swamp Izzo’s presence is the album’s biggest seal of authenticity.
MUSIC also features Metro Boomin, who, like Zaytoven, was personally impacted by the past few years of losses. And so to follow up the blockbuster 2024 he had with Future, Metro brings us back to the music he remembers from when he was 16.
A Futuristic Summa revives Atlanta’s “futuristic swag” era, a short-lived time in the late 2000s when a trip to the strip club sounded as innocent as a trip to the mall. Broadly, the music felt like a PG-13 version of the music propagating across the city; despite how its makers borrowed trap music’s hi-hats, futuristic swag was buoyant because of how groups like Travis Porter and Rich Kidz featured literal teens, sing-rapping through getting turnt up, making it rain, and balling all day. It’s been hard to decide which part of Metro’s historic reenactment feels more surreal: the freakishly accurate throwback production; or the featured singer-rappers who still sound like half their age. (That especially goes for J Money, who, under another moniker, literally brought the “futuristic” to “futuristic swag.”) Only the interludes give away that Metro didn’t time-travel during the making. "I'm tired of the percocet music," as one outro goes.
On second thought, there was another dead giveaway: “Take Me Thru Dere,” Futuristic Summa’s biggest hit, for how it prominently features some of the women who made Atlanta nostalgia undeniably cool.
It’s one thing for someone like Metro Boomin to use throwback production to relive his youth. It’s another for Gen Zers to make late 2000s mixtape aesthetics fashionable again, when they were barely alive in the era of LiveMixtapes. No one had more fun this year than Pluto and YK Niece when they dug up D4L slang and an OJ da Juiceman deep cut to make “WHIM WHAMIEE.” No one sounded as self-possessed as BunnaB, who turned trash TV predicaments into schoolyard taunts over beats we’d remember from DatPiff (and hey, songs by Jermaine Dupri and Zaytoven, too, harkening back to that same era). It makes sense, then, that Metro would call up YK Niece and feature Breskii on “Take Me Thru Dere,” when that song was only the second track that Breskii had ever recorded.
“Every couple of years, this new breed of MC, of artists, bursts onto the scene and creates this whole new cultural dominance for the city,” DJ Drama told the Atlanta Is… podcast. The last examples he could think of were Playboi Carti and Gunna. But he couldn’t deny how the past few years of tragedies felt like “a dark cloud over the city,” and how he wasn’t seeing new talent crop up as usual. That is, before he’d link with Anycia.
Leading up to this year, Anycia was just as game to team up with sexy drill star Cash Cobain as she was plugg music producer Popstar Benny. But her Grady Baby mixtape adds context to where she came from, down to its wholesale sample of Mannie Fresh’s production of Jeezy’s “And Then What,” in the song “ATW.” She also tapped Drama, making Grady Baby the first by a female rapper from her own city to get an official Gangsta Grillz release.
Atlanta rap’s nostalgia for this era won’t end in 2025, if Lil Baby and Playboi Carti’s “Let’s Do It” is any indication.
Released in early December, the song prominently samples “Wassup,” the 2009 hit by Rich Kidz, and features member Skooly to make the reference abundantly clear. For the past decade at least, Skooly has sought out credit for being the first to make trap music go melodic. His hooks from the late 2000s explain how trap went from sounding like Jeezy to Young Thug, whose first feature was on “100 Dollar Autograph” by Rich Kidz, and Carti, who sampled the group in MUSIC’s “LIKE WEEZY.” Yet this has been a tough case to make to those who didn’t witness it firsthand, for reasons beyond Skooly’s control. DJ Spinz, Metro Boomin’s co-producer in A Futuristic Summa, got his start in music producing for Travis Porter and Rich Kidz. He says that era of music got lost in rap’s mass migration from DatPiff to today’s digital service providers. “It’s really hard for you to find a lot of that music,” Spinz told Atlanta journalist B High, “because when you go on Spotify, it’s not there. Or you go on Apple Music, it’s not there.”
It’s hard, as Spinz says—though it’s not impossible, as Zaytoven can attest.
Pluto initially made “WHIM WHAMIEE” with a YouTube beat that sampled “Right Hand Cooking,” a Gutter and OJ da Juiceman song that Zay produced in 2009. Eight months after Atlanta Is… first chatted with Zaytoven—and shortly before A Futuristic Summa dropped—Zay was still wrapping his mind around how “WHIM WHAMIEE” even came to exist. As he told the podcast, Zay hadn’t seen the record take off on TikTok for himself—he had only overheard it as one of his kids was scrolling. When he caught the 16-year-old sample, he thought, They don’t know nothing about that. They too young to even know what that is.
The making of A Futuristic Summa was a different story. Zaytoven recognized damn near everyone that Metro Boomin had called into the studio. The scene reminded him of when Gucci Mane, OJ da Juiceman, and so many others used to pile into his parents’ basement, recording songs with him until the sun rose. “ We using the old keyboards and old drum machines from back then. So I was like, Oh, this, this right on my alley. I know it's gonna be something special,” he says.
After decades of charting a path forward for rap music at large, innovating on a global scale, to hear Atlanta rap get unapologetically nostalgic has been surreal. But it’s also clear that its biggest players weren’t just revisiting the sounds from that era. They were remembering why they made the music we love in the first place.
__