The story goes that Lil Baby (born Dominique Jones in 1994) didn’t even really want to rap. He’d had encouragement—P and Coach K, the Atlanta kingmakers/Quality Control heads who helped launch Migos, had been on him since he was a teenager hustling dice in the street—but Baby wasn’t interested. But two years on a possession charge gave him more time to think than he wanted. Then the work came fast: Within a year of starting to rap, he’d released six mixtapes and a full-length album, 2018’s Harder Than Ever. (Young Thug, an early booster, paid him to spend time in the studio instead of the streets.) Compared to his Atlanta peers (Thug, Gunna, Migos, etc.), Baby’s persona was muted: He shrugged off fashion shows, didn’t have tattoos (he didn’t want potential business partners from the buttoned-up world thinking he was something he wasn’t), and kept his boasts mild: “I never call myself a GOAT/I leave that love to the people,” he raps on 2020’s “Emotionally Scarred.” But the lyricism was there, as were the low-key intensity and no-frills ethic that have become his hallmark. By the end of 2020, he’d been nominated for a Grammy Award, made the chart-topping album My Turn, and was named Artist of the Year at the Apple Music Awards. Baby quickly leapfrogged those high-water marks with The Voice of the Heroes—his chart-topping 2021 team-up album with Chicago’s Lil Durk—and the next year’s solo triumph It’s Only Me. In both contexts, he punctuates his drawled air of well-earned confidence with flashes of scrappy urgency like someone who no longer needs to prove himself unless he’s directly challenged.