killjae

Overview

Five posts. No press. No interviews. The music found its people anyway.

There is an artist from Richmond, Virginia who has been building something in the underground for four years that most people still haven’t heard.

He doesn’t explain himself. He doesn’t announce releases. He doesn’t run campaigns. He just puts music out and disappears back into silence, and somehow the music keeps finding people anyway.

This is the story of how someone who has been watching people die around him turned that into music, linked with a collective nobody had written about yet, ran through red lights next to someone who would become one of the most talked about young rappers in the country, and did all of it with five Instagram posts and no press.

01 Richmond

killjae is from Virginia, closer to Richmond. He started releasing music in 2021, around seventeen years old. His Instagram bio is one word. He has never given an interview.

His music is not built on concepts. It’s built on what actually happened. killjae raps the way people talk when they’ve already processed something and moved past the emotion of it. The flatness in his delivery isn’t aesthetic. It’s someone who has been desensitized by real loss and is still putting music out anyway.

Lowkey tryna get rich off the rap.

killjae — Dead People

Not “I’m rich.” Not “I’m on.” Just lowkey trying to make it work. A kid from Richmond who has been watching people around him get hurt, who started putting music into the world as a way through it, who is still right now quietly trying to turn this into something real.

Richmond was already cooking when killjae started. Another kid from the same city, going by Nettspend, was uploading to SoundCloud at the same time, building from the same nothing. In 2023 they made 2Up2Dwn together. That same year Nettspend rapped a line in a song called No Waiting that went: “I’m with lil killjae smoking on a blunt.” Not a feature credit. Not an announcement. Just killjae’s name in the verse, present tense, as someone Nettspend was physically with when he wrote it.

What happened to Nettspend after 2023 is public record. Drankdrankdrank went viral. Shine N Peace landed on the New York Times best songs list. He walked Miu Miu in Paris. He walked Gucci in Milan. He headlined Rolling Loud before his eighteenth birthday. Early Life Crisis dropped March 2026.

killjae was in the room with him before all of that. Nettspend was putting his name in songs before either of them had an audience. That’s not a story about one person winning and another losing. That’s a story about Richmond, a city that was producing artists at that level in 2023 while nobody was paying attention. killjae is still in that same city, still building, and the momentum behind his name is entirely his own.

02 TMS

Somewhere between the Henchmob era and now, killjae found Too Many Strikers. Or Too Many Strikers found him. The origin story doesn’t exist anywhere publicly.

Too Many Strikers is a collective founded by producer SJR2800. To understand what makes TMS different you have to understand what SJR2800 is doing with beats. He’s not making typical plugg production. He’s not making typical DMV crank. He’s pulling from electronic music, from rave, from sounds that have no obvious home in underground rap, and giving them to artists who rap over them like it’s the most natural thing in the world. One writer described his production as bringing “Clams Casino vibes to a region plagued by darkness and rote production.” SJR2800 is the reason TMS sounds like nothing else coming out of Virginia or DC right now.

Jump is one example of what that sounds like in practice. Produced by SJR2800, posted by killjae in October 2025. The beat sounds like a hard electronic dub record, something you’d expect to hear in a club somewhere in Europe, not over a rapper from Richmond talking about staying alive. killjae raps over it without flinching. The SoundCloud comments couldn’t place it. “more rave beats bro please.” “groovy asf.” “visionary.” “this shit is insane.” Dragnutz took the same beat and made HARDSTYL, his own version, completely different direction. Two artists, same production, completely different results. That’s the range SJR2800 is working with.

Jaeychino is from Northwest Washington DC and is the most publicly visible face of TMS. Pitchfork featured him. He did an On The Radar freestyle. He was nominated for Rookie of the Year at the Underground Rap Awards in 2024. His music explores trauma and self-reflection over production that shouldn’t work but does. He released a 15-track mixtape called WATCH THE THRONE in August 2024 and is signed to PRNLDOCC Records, distributed through Sony’s Santa Anna Records. The fact that Jaeychino has a Sony distribution deal while still operating inside a collective this underground tells you exactly where TMS sits right now, one foot in the independent world, one foot in something bigger.

Dragnutz is Jaeychino’s constant collaborator. Every major TMS release has both of them on it. i-95, BLITZ, KILLING THE REF, 4Lifers. Where Jaeychino is reflective, Dragnutz is raw. The contrast between them is what makes the TMS sound feel textured rather than one-note.

ST6 JodyBoof is the bridge between TMS and the wider underground. He had his own On The Radar freestyle. His catalog goes back to 2023 and has been consistent, ARP, UW6, Supersport, Strike Club in 2026. In March 2025 he made a song with xaviersobased called 1C34TMS, the title combining xaviersobased’s collective 1c34 with Too Many Strikers. Two worlds formally acknowledging each other in a song title. xaviersobased has 1.2 million monthly Spotify listeners, a FADER cover story, and a deal with Atlantic Records. The fact that JodyBoof made that record with him and named it after both crews is a statement about where TMS is positioned in the current underground landscape. killjae is in TMS. That connection runs one degree from him.

kuru came up through NOVAGANG and the internet rap world, digicore, cloud rap, before TMS. His album re:wired dropped November 2024 on deadAir Records and landed in critical year-end lists. His follow-up Stay True Forever came in 2025. He has a Dazed Digital feature. His X bio says two words: “too many strikers.” kuru is the reason people outside the DMV hip hop lane know TMS exists at all.

tovi barely has a public presence. He shows up in credits, in verses, in comments. killjae named him directly in i-95, “got love for lil’ tovi, somebody gettin’ dropped.” When Dead People came out, tovi left a ghost emoji underneath it on SoundCloud. That’s the entire documented relationship between them publicly. In this world, that’s enough.

killjae is the Richmond link. Every other member comes from the DMV, DC, Maryland. killjae is the one bringing the Virginia end into the collective, connecting TMS to the same city that produced Nettspend, the same underground that was already building something before anyone was paying attention.

03 ROADRUNNA

killjae has been releasing music since 2021. EPs, collaborative tapes, loosies, singles dropped without announcement into the SoundCloud void. HOMECOMING in 2022. Down Deep in 2023. How To Kill in 2024. Each one building something, each one finding a slightly larger audience than the last. ROADRUNNA, released June 20, 2025, is his first full album. Not his first project, his first album. That distinction matters. It’s the first time he committed to a full statement rather than a dispatch.

The album title was already in his mouth before he named it. “I’m a real road runner, ain’t tappin’ no brakes” on i-95 in 2024. “Real road-runna, be goin’ through red lights” on Dead People in January 2025. By the time ROADRUNNA dropped in June, the word had been part of his identity for at least a year. It wasn’t a concept he built the album around. It was who he already was, formalized.

There are no features on ROADRUNNA. Twelve tracks, eighteen minutes, entirely solo. After years of collaborative tapes with Jugnino, starsaga, elijxhwtf, after building his name through other people’s worlds as much as his own, his first full album is just him. That’s a choice. Everything you hear on ROADRUNNA is killjae and the TMS production bench with nothing else in between.

Every producer on ROADRUNNA comes from inside the TMS world. Jayms handled 2 AM and KIMK, the opener and the self-titled track sitting in the middle of his own album. Twentythree, the producer most known for his work with Jaeychino, Dragnutz, and killjae, produced FULL EFFECT, CATCH ME, and TTM. histarkey produced POSE. Forestmilan took KK. 19thou produced BLOOD DROP. Kickn and drevenci built VA 2 LA together. myrlu closed it out on MOMENT OF SILENCE. This is not a rapper who went shopping for beats. This is a rapper whose collective built his album around him.

The sequencing tells you things. 2 AM opens it cold, already mid-thought. KK, his own initials, sits at track five, a self-named moment in the middle of his first full album. VA 2 LA makes the geography explicit, Virginia to Los Angeles, the distance between where he is and where things are pulling. MOMENT OF SILENCE ends it without a word of explanation. The same way everything killjae does ends, posted, left alone, done.

Dead People had dropped in January 2025 and was already finding its audience by the time ROADRUNNA arrived in June. The album gave that audience somewhere to land. People who found the song followed it to the album. The album pulled them deeper. 110 ratings on Rate Your Music, more than triple what How To Kill had at the same point. Monthly listeners climbing. The cult forming in real time, quietly, without killjae doing a single thing to accelerate it.

04 Right Now

Seven singles since January 2026. South, FINFIN, Lil Ole Bag, Friends, Paranoid, Blood, Dropout. All posted without announcement, left to find whoever it finds. Dropout came out April 6. It’s his current artist pick on Spotify.

16,195 Monthly Listeners — Spotify — April 2026

Every one of those followers got there through the music. Not through a viral moment, not through content, not through a co-sign. Through a song that hit them somewhere specific and they followed it back to the source. A fan sent killjae a DM on Instagram with two photos of a white Acura, front end completely destroyed, hood crumpled back into the engine bay, sitting on the side of a highway at sunset. The message said: “yo bro i was listening to pick n roll n it got me cutting up then i lost control hit the guardrail and spun songs too crazy.” killjae posted it to his story. No caption. That’s the whole relationship in one exchange, someone who found the music, felt close enough to treat killjae like someone they actually know, and killjae receiving it and saying nothing back except reposting it.

The SoundCloud comments say the same thing in smaller doses. Under Dead People, people quote the lines back verbatim like they need him to know they heard it. Under Jump, someone wrote “visionary” and someone else wrote “How do yall listen to this bro”, not dismissively, but genuinely confused by the fact that it exists. Under HARDSTYL, Dragnutz’s version of the same SJR2800 beat, someone wrote “dis so hard but killjae lwk did betta” and sparked a debate about which version wins. People are picking sides between killjae and Dragnutz on the same production. Nobody asked them to care that much.

kuru has press behind his name. Xaviersobased signed to Atlantic. The infrastructure killjae has been inside since before anyone was paying attention is becoming the thing people are now paying attention to. Nettspend is walking runways and headlining festivals. He used to be in the room with killjae in Richmond, putting killjae’s name in his songs before either of them had anything.

The underground killjae built inside is becoming the underground everyone wants to be close to. He didn’t chase it. He kept his head down and never stopped. He already has the underground. Once he opens up the doors to the public, it’s pretty much over for the artists that are trying to compete.

No Waiting

Jump

ROADRUNNA

Dropout