Lushe

Presented by Pulp Agency & 17 RECORDS Some career paths follow no logic anyone can name.

Presented by Pulp Agency & 17 RECORDS

Some career paths follow no logic anyone can name. Lushe did not grow up with rap. At 20, he started filming videos on TikTok: a mic, a sample, a few words laid down. No calculation, no strategy. Just the obvious sense of a guy 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 enthusiasm began. Then came a freestyle imagining a feat with Big Flo & Oli, laid over the last seconds of one of their tracks. The dream became reality: the two Toulouse rappers 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 core of the character. He has not been shaped by a decade on stage, and he did not absorb the codes before writing. He arrives with his obsessions intact: a childhood partly spent in Russia, and a depression he has come through. All of this runs through 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, singular in substance. Without seeking it, Lushe has become one of the spearheads of a strong return of classic rap, a genre many thought was dying and which 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 addressed 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 moves people without trying to. 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.