Pitchfork writer Alphonse Pierre’s rap column covers songs, mixtapes, albums, Instagram freestyles, memes, weird tweets, fashion trends—and anything else that catches his attention.Nino Paid is the quietest rapper I’ve ever met. Getting a word out of him requires the patience of a fisherman. On my first day with him, in a large, faceless apartment complex, in Prince George’s County, Maryland, surrounded by trees and highways, he speaks just loudly enough to be heard across his living room only when he’s playing Call of Duty: Warzone on his Xbox, getting into a verbal dust-up with some sort of nine-year-old. (“Shut the fuck up, I’m gonna beat that ass!”) Otherwise, when I ask Nino a question, he scratches his chin and shifts the thin, gold-tinted frames on his face as he thinks long and hard about a response. I can tell that his mind is racing, but rarely do words come out. Instead, he’ll just smirk or stare longingly, letting the moment pass by.His apartment is barely furnished—nothing but a sofa, a TV mounted on the wall playing a Netflix procedural on mute, a mound of dirty laundry, and a little weed and a few Xanax bars scattered across the counter. The 22-year-old rapper and his friend Lul Flock9—they met three years ago when they both had nowhere else to go and were staying in the same basement—shut the blinds and pass a blunt back and forth. Soon enough, they close their eyes and throw on Nino’s music: plainspoken, confessional DMV street rap, as dark as it is optimistic. “The music is really an outlet for me,” says Nino. “I’ve been in and out of jail since I was 14. Jail teaches you to be antisocial; you learn you can’t open up to just anyone. It’s different when I’m rapping.”You can tell. His raps are raw, unfiltered, and deeply personal. “I’m tired of going through pain/I’m thinking I’m destined for greatness or maybe I’m goin’ insane,” he opens “Pain & Possibilities,” the meditative single that made him one of the hottest new stars in the DMV. As a writer, he calls to mind the wounded diary entries of YoungBoy and the druggy introspection of Alternative Trap–era Lucki. He separates himself, though, with music that’s firmly rooted in DMV crank, a popular regional street rap style marked by apocalyptic drums and a menacing, drill-esque delivery. And Nino takes that foundation and softens it with a cloudier beat selection—instrumentals for songs like “Paid” and “Black Ball” sound as if Main Attrakionz mainstays Friendzone grew up in southeast D.C.—and vulnerable rhymes that balance heavy subjects like homelessness and suicidal ideation with earnest flashbacks of romance and getting money.
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