For the lockdown superstar, omnipresent fame feels very much like obscurity used to. “I’ve been waiting a long time to go play with the fans,” says Powfu – AKA 22-year-old, Canadian lo-fi rapper Isaiah Faber – gazing around at the same four walls he was staring at before his breakthrough track Death Bed (Coffee for Your Head) unexpectedly racked up 360m YouTube streams, 4bn TikTok plays in March 2020 alone, and major chart placings worldwide at the very start of the pandemic. “But it’s made it a bit easier because it wasn’t like everything hit me at once. It’s not full-level yet.”
He learned to play drums aged two, and in his teens started to borrow his punk singer dad’s microphone to rap over “super-relaxing” beats he found online. Powfu swiftly became a pioneer of lo-fi rap, wherein DIY bedroom rappers – often teenage and troubled – pour out open-diary verses about relationship woes, addiction and depression over intimate backing tracks, their music then shared among SoundCloud’s thriving fan community cum sonic support group. “I was pretty lonely when I started making music,” Powfu admits. “I’d just stay at home, I didn’t really hang out with friends, so I feel like a lot of people that listened to it were in the same boat. It’s a very open genre, you talk about anything that’s going through your mind. I feel like it sounds more real than most mainstream pop music because it’s more dirty-sounding. You can tell that they recorded it in their bedroom by themselves, just writing down their thoughts.”
The perfect lockdown comfort listen, lo-fi became arguably the first fully streaming-driven DIY scene, with artists such as Powfu, Rxseboy and Sadboyprolific sliding into each other’s DMs on SoundCloud. Trying to turn the British grunge-popper Beabadoobee into an international cause célèbre by sampling her, helium-style, on Death Bed, was more of a slog, though. For months, Powfu was allegedly stonewalled for clearance by her people, until he caved in to fan demand and uploaded it anyway. “I was like: ‘I might get in trouble if I post this on Spotify, but everybody’s begging me … I’ll do it for the fans.’ So I posted it and it got taken down. And then it got re-uploaded by the label and Beabadoobee and everybody.”
A year later, Powfu has Blink-182’s Travis Barker requesting guest spots on his new EP, Drinking Under the Street Lights, a catalogue of tales of turbulent families, Mario Kart romances and exchange students who pass in the night. But is he ready to face post-lockdown Powfumania? “It’s been kind of nice for us [lo-fi acts] because we can continue to do what we’ve always done … but I’m ready.” He glances once more around the silent walls of his apartment. “It might be a big upgrade.”
