Lushe

Presented by Pulp Agency & 17 RECORDS. Some trajectories follow no logic anyone knows. Lushe did not grow up with rap. At 20, he began filming videos on TikTok: a mic, a sample, a few words laid over it. No calculation, no strategy. Just the obvious sense of a lad who writes well. He moved on to Rihanna as well as Aznavour, or Le Temps est bon, until he started creating his own samples. The buzz began. Then came a freestyle imagining a feature with Big Flo & Oli, laid over the last seconds of one of their tracks. The dream became reality: the two rappers from Toulouse offered to record it for real.

Lushe is 21 and has two years of rap behind him. That youth is not a detail; it is the heart of the character. He has not been shaped by a decade on the scene, and he did not absorb the codes before writing. He arrives with his obsessions intact: a childhood partly spent in Russia, a bout of depression he has come through. All of it finds its way into his lyrics without being put on display, with the restraint of someone who has learned to tell apart what is said from what is sung.

His rap is boom bap, classic in form and singular in substance. Without seeking to, Lushe has become one of the spearheads of a strong comeback for classic rap, a genre once thought to be dying out that is finding new youth. Montmartre, his best-known track, simply tells a true story: two lovers at the top of a hill, an "I love you" said for the first time, and a letter to his partner telling her again that she is strong and must not doubt it. There is a tenderness and a sincerity in this track that move without trying to move. Perhaps that is what explains everything else.

In two years, Lushe has reached 700,000 monthly listeners on Spotify, completed a sold-out French tour and filled La Maroquinerie in under twenty-four hours for his first solo concert.