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Every fashion-adjacent person in New York thinks they know somebody who can get them a table at Lucien—and given that tonight is the first night of New York Fashion Week, the storied French bistro in the East Village is even more backed up than usual. But on this chilly February evening, the 17-year-old rapper Nettspend is making Lucien wait for him.
For at least the last 40 minutes, Nettspend and his crew have been posted up in front of the restaurant inside a black Escalade idling at the curb. On the fan-favorite 2023 track “We Not Like You,” Nett raps, “We on the East Coast, bitch / I’m rockin’ real expensive fits,” and when the teenage musician finally emerges, shortly after 10 p.m., he’s living up to that boast: hefty black Supreme faux-fur jacket, Saint Laurent tank, and ombré-tinted Tom Ford sunglasses, which he bought earlier that day at Bloomingdale’s uptown. (The Tom Ford boutique proper was out of this particular style, so he had to do a bit of hunting.) He flashes me a little smile, and we all head into the restaurant together.
Lucien was a genuine-article watering hole for the art world when it first opened—in 1998, nine years before Nettspend was born—and in the post-TikTok era it remains an especially sceney place for good-looking people to be seen gulping down martinis and cigarettes. (This is the spot where, three Februaries ago, Kanye West gifted five Hermès Birkin bags to his then girlfriend Julia Fox and her pals. When I mention this to Nettspend, he mumbles, with a dim glimmer of recognition, “Really?”) Our party—including Nett; his 20-something manager, Nolan Riddle; and Nett’s friends from back home in Richmond, Virginia, Nick and Bryce, who are, respectively, a guy Nett went to school with and a guy Nett met when he heard a Ken Carson song playing on the house speakers at an indoor trampoline park and went in search of the employee who’d put it on—settles into a snug table near the door. Drinks and bread baskets arrive swiftly.
For Zoomers and members of Gen Alpha, Nettspend probably needs no introduction. For anybody else: Since he burst on the scene in 2023, Nett immediately captivated a cultish fan base with his slurry, AutoTuned flow and deep-fried beats that sound like old ringtones. Every generation makes music that their parents just don’t understand, but Nett’s music seems custom-designed to irritate and alienate anyone over, say, 19, particularly seasoned hip-hop fans whose conception of the genre doesn’t involve feral white children reared on Roblox. And while Nettspend is only one of countless new artists working in this vein, the ethereally baby-faced teen has become a compelling figurehead. If he wasn’t busy rapping about “slut trucks” and Percocet, you could imagine him, in another era, featured within the pages of Tiger Beat. (As one commenter on r/Nettspend put it, “He’s so beautiful bruh.”)
“It get weird growing up,” Nett warbles on “Growing Up,” the aptly titled opening track off his debut mixtape, Bad Ass F*cking Kid, which dropped in December. (“I know I’m still a lil’ bit childish... But I ain’t no child, bitch,” he squeaks on a later song called “Tyla”). Nonetheless, he’s right. It does get weird growing up—particularly when you’ve been crowned by a major record label as the voice of a generation of rap fans to whom the late-30-something likes of Drake and Kendrick Lamar seem practically geriatric.
At Lucien, I ask Nettspend how long he’s been in New York City. Three days seems to be the answer. Or four. Maybe a week? “It's all bleeding together,” he murmurs, his voice barely audible over the Motown hits blaring on the restaurant’s sound system. “I have fun out here. I always have fun out here.” But this is also a work trip: Nett and the Richmond boys woke up this morning at a recording studio, after Nett stayed up all night making new music for his proper full-length debut album that will be released by the Interscope-affiliated label Grade A, home to the poppy Australian rapper The Kid Laroi and the late cypher Juice WRLD.
Last year, Nett and Riddle moved into a mansion in Los Angeles, which Nett admits feels “a little bit” like home now. He still makes it down to Richmond from time to time. But he enjoys it here in New York: “Being outside and then being in the studio,” he elaborates. “Being out here and being able to do shit I can't do in LA, like…”
“Like going to the deli at four in the morning,” suggests Nett’s pal Nick, who also records and produces music under his surname, Zuro.
“Yeah,” Nett agrees. “Just like…New Yorking.”
I ask for more detail on what Nettspend means by “New Yorking.” His response may as well have been a bar from one of his songs: “Shit. I’m at Lucien. I’m at the studio. I’m outside. I’m in a black truck.”
Indeed, they’ve spent enough time at this restaurant that Nett regards its proprietors as “family.” When owner Zac Bahaj swings by to touch the table, the rapper lights up at the sight of his Louis Vuitton puffer jacket: “This that drip! I ain't going to lie, this shit crazy!”
This spirited moment aside, to call Nettspend soft-spoken would be an understatement. There’s an adage I once saw painted on a ceramic plaque at a souvenir store that goes, “Raising a teenager is like trying to nail Jell-O to a tree.” This is also a good description of what it feels like to have a conversation with Nettspend. Sometimes he’ll pause for 10 or 20 seconds before answering, a span that can feel like an eternity, before replying with just a few words. (“I’m trying to think,” he’ll assure me. He’s like this online, too, a notorious poster-and-deleter.) As we talk, I realize I’m tempering my own cadence to match his sparse, low tone, as if I’d encountered a small animal in the woods and was trying not to scare them off. Judging by the demeanor of my tablemates that night, as well as other homies I met previously, members of Nett’s crew also tend to share this monosyllabic disposition.
I was first introduced to Nettspend, briefly, on a bitter-cold evening last December. He’d released BAFK the day before, and was about to take the stage at Irving Plaza, the legendary all-ages venue just east of Manhattan’s Union Square. I opened the door of the venue’s greenroom and found the rapper surrounded by several phone-scrolling label reps and a gaggle of teenagers that included Richmond friends wearing big Balenciaga hoodies and, I’m told, Supreme founder James Jebbia’s teenage daughter, who’d brought Nett a yet-to-be-released jacket from the brand’s Dickies collaboration. (Later on, during the show, the model and professional man-about-town Evan Mock made a brief appearance in the VIP section.) They sat in an uncanny, almost meditative quiet—no music, barely any conversation. An adjacent kitchenette was stocked with enough name-brand junk food to fill a suburban snack household’s pantry (Pop-Tarts, Pringles, Chips Ahoy, three varieties of Cheetos); Nett’s bodyguard brewed him a cup of tea.
The stillness of the greenroom was the calm before the Category 5 storm already brewing in the general-admission area downstairs, where a primordial mosh pit of sweaty, red-faced, mostly male teenagers were already readying themselves for maximum impact, pressing their abdomens against the creaking metal barricades by the stage as opener DJ Rennessy hyped up the crowd with SoundCloud’s greatest hits. Ahead of Nettspend’s headlining act, venue security rushed to batten down the hatches by propping up the barricades with huge, heavy-duty road cases.
When Nettspend finally bounded onto the stage, hundreds of cellphone cameras lit up below him, and the thrashing sea of broccoli haircuts swelled to a surge. In the pit, a crew of ragers—diverse but uniformly young—chanted along with Nett’s every AutoTuned yowl. I watched from the balcony while standing next to a man who introduced himself as Nettspend’s lawyer; in one truly stunning moment, the crowd briefly parted to form a small, protective circle around one of its members, so that he could retie the wraparound laces on his Rick Owens Geobasket sneakers. Onstage, Nett stripped off his Alpha Industries bomber jacket and energetically bounced around with a rock-star-in-the-making confidence that was nowhere to be found in the greenroom earlier. (Later on, a member of Nett’s team described him to me as “if Harry Styles had access to promethazine.”)
Once he had performed three songs, each barely two minutes long, I swung back downstairs to check out the scene up close. The puddle of vomit I sidestepped on the way may have been an indication of sheer overexertion on the crowd’s part; Nett’s lyrics are druggy, his concert visuals feature Claymation letters that spell out the word “KETAMINE,” and the wafting smoke inside the venue smelled like weed and vape juice, but the downstairs bar was completely empty. On true all-ages nights like this, the bartender told me, “All they want is water.”
Minutes after Nett finished his set, someone pulled a fire alarm, forcing everyone to evacuate the hall. Near the venue’s side exit off East 15th Street, a hoard gathered with their phone cameras held aloft, waiting for Nett to emerge. Finally he appeared, his icy blond hair barely obscured by the hood of his new Supreme jacket, and was greeted by Beatlesque bedlam: Yo, Nett, Nett! I love you, Nett! Fans clamored up the sidewalk scaffolding and onto the roof of a nearby car for a better look. A breakaway group chased after his SUV as it motored down the block, bound for Lucien.
The eldest of four children, Nettspend was born Gunner Shepardson on March 18, 2007, approximately three months before Apple released the first iPhone. His family dynamics are a sensitive topic, but what he’ll say is that his dad is a country singer and his aunt is a DJ. What does she spin? “Really everything,” Nett says. (He adds, “She's all over the place. But I haven't talked to her in a while. I hope she's okay.”)
He grew up riding dirt bikes, skateboarding, and absorbing pop music of all sorts: Justin Bieber, Future, Katy Perry, Michael Jackson. (He has a red-ink tattoo of the Bad album logo on his torso; his favorite MJ song is “Man in the Mirror.”) Around 2017, when Nett was in fifth grade, he started hopping on tracks with his friends and taking advantage of the entry-level music-production tools available online, particularly the self-service phone app BandLab. In true SoundCloud generation fashion, Nett soon began dropping songs at a rapid clip.
“As a kid, I just knew I wanted to make music. That was always at the back of my head, because my family loves it,” he says. “I just knew I had to work for it.”
Like many kids his age, Nett fully checked out of school during the pandemic. He’d been spending most of his time on the internet anyway, becoming acquainted via SoundCloud and Discord with fellow musicians in far-flung locales and scoring hyper-online hits with tracks like “drankdrankdrank” and “shine n peace.” At varying points, he was kicked out of both of his parents’ houses. (“Fuck CPS, I’m filthy rich,” he rapped on a ditty called “16,” as a kiss-off to the Child Protective Services.) He dropped out after his freshman year, and his pal Nick convinced him to start taking music seriously, introducing him to the Upper West Side rapper and producer Xaviersobased, born Xavier Lopez, now 21, who became a friend and frequent collaborator. (He’s also friendly with the South Carolina rapper OsamaSon, also 21; although several of the young Nett fans I spoke to outside the December show seemed concerned about Nett and OsamaSon unfollowing each other on Instagram, OsamaSon has since described their relationship as “chill.”)
Nett is part of a loose stylistic cohort whose sound builds on a variety of post-2010s semi-underground, opiate-flavored rap traditions, including rage-rap godfathers from Chief Keef and Travis Scott to Playboy Carti, Yeat, and Ken Carson; a now-lost Soundcloud generation of emo cyphers like Lil Peep, XXXTentacion, and Juice WLRD; and Swedish sad-boy pontificators like Yung Lean and Bladee. Although Xav and OsamaSon tend to fare better with the critics, Nett has quickly become the blond-haired, blue-eyed poster child of this broadly diverse scene. Pitchfork’s Meaghan Garvey referred to him as “post-rage, post-race, post-everything.” On the BAFK song “Beach Leak,” Nett proclaims, “I feel like Future, but Gen Z,” and while he’s far from the first white rapper to enrapture an audience of his peers and/or interloping lookie-loos, his success feels like the inevitable endpoint of hip-hop’s transformation at the hands of white kids raised on the Black internet.
Over the last year, Nett has garnered high-profile cosigns from New York Times critics as well as Lil Uzi Vert. He drew a raucous crowd last March at the Rolling Loud festival in LA, where he shared a bill with the likes of Post Malone and Ty Dolla $ign, affirming that the Nettspend phenomenon could translate IRL. The quintessential Nettspend fan—born into a post-9/11 generation known for its overall malaise and detachment—is a Janus cat whose faces portray genuine sincerity and based irony in equal measure. When one subreddit user asked, “Does anybody else get chills when listening to nett?,” such a query could be read as heartfelt, or snarky, or, most likely, a bit of both.
Again, his music is practically lab-engineered to make even the most with-it adults say, “Turn that shit off!” And that may be an end in itself. (A counterpoint: Tyler, the Creator cultivated a similarly abrasive atmosphere with Odd Future nearly 15 years ago, and in the intervening decade and a half has become one his generation’s foremost blue-chip arbiters of taste and culture.) But lend Nettspend your elder ear and you may just learn to embrace the brain-eating earworms, from the goofily inane (“She a scene bitch, like Pinterest is her friend”), to the indignant (“Don’t try fuckin’ with me, ’cause you weren’t fuckin’ with me”), to the metaphysical (“I’m looking at the sky, thinking ’bout how high it goes”). And you may nod along, thinking, I mean, how high does the sky go?
Back at Lucien, I ask Nett what kind of music he’s been listening to, and he tells me he needs to check on his phone. He scrolls for a while. “Yung Lean,” he chirps. He scrolls some more. “ICP,” as in the Michigan horrorcore rap collective Insane Clown Posse. He’s never heard of the Gathering of the Juggalos, the group’s annual festival, though his interest seems piqued when I mention it. “Where is it?” he asks. “It’s in Ohio,” I say. “Really?” he replies, intrigued enough.
Next up, he’s hitting the road with Xaviersobased for his Invert Tour, which kicked off in Seattle last week. This past Tuesday, to commemorate both the occasion and Nettspend’s golden birthday—he turned 18 on March 18—he and Xav dropped a new song they cooked up called “Impact,” a duet over a twinkly beat that sounds like smashing on a xylophone, which they’d been teasing on Instagram Live. “I’m an empath, shorty know my impact,” Nett chants on the chorus. (Singles aside, he’s still cranking on that full-length album, which may or may not arrive before the end of the year. You remember that thing about nailing Jell-O to a tree?)
Anyway, he’s bringing his pals on tour, and he’s excited.
“I've never been on a tour bus before,” he says. The vibe on this tour bus, he maintains, is going to be “party, party, party. Party hardy. For real.”
Then, Nett makes an abrupt signal that he needs to scoot out of the red leather booth. He goes to take a breather outside. He returns a few minutes later, and the food arrives. Every guy at the table has ordered medium-rare steak frites—it’s sort of the thing to get here—except for Nettspend, who’s ordered what he always orders: buttered noodles.
The waiter sets down four plates of bloody filets doused in au poivre sauce, and one shallow bowl of butter-slicked linguine flecked with minced parsley and thin shavings of parmesan. On the side is a small ramekin of chili flakes, which Nett picks up and inspects for a moment, before placing it back down on the table unused.
Aside from a cursed 10 p.m. espresso, I haven’t ordered any food; not knowing how this evening might go, I made sure to eat beforehand.
Nett eyes my empty place setting.
“You want some?” he asks, gently tilting the bowl of buttered noodles toward me.
I chuckle and decline. No, no! Those are yours.
Without missing a beat, Nett picks up a spare bread plate off the table, onto which he heaps several hearty forkfuls of linguine. He hands me the plate, along with a clean fork.
I laugh again, a little stunned. For me?
Nett smiles and nods, his eyes glinting over the top of his Tom Ford sunglasses.
Everyone starts eating, and the table falls quiet again. I twirl some pasta onto my fork and, for some reason, feel momentarily surprised to discover that restaurant-made buttered noodles taste exactly as I remembered from when I was a kid. Oily, chewy, cheesy. I don’t know what I was expecting.
A recent visit to Japan meant Nettspend had to venture out of his gastronomic comfort zone. He ate tons of ramen. “I was eating shit from the gas station,” he says. “I was eating Japanese barbecue and stuff like that.” He also played a concert in Kyoto, where he was moved that the audience knew all the words to his songs, and filmed the puppy-love-ish music video for “Growing Up,” which featured Nett walking handcuffed to his girlfriend, the model Mazzy Joya, whom he met while filming a previous music video, through the neon-lit streets of Tokyo. He went shopping and bought a Björk shirt.
“I think the thing that really opened my eyes was when I left the country for the first time,” Nett says, as animated as I’ve seen him. This was last June, when he traveled to London for a one-off solo show.
“As soon as I got off the plane, everything felt different. It's like when you get high for the first time. Wherever else you go, it doesn't feel like the first time you left the country. After you leave for the first time, you kind of understand what it's like leaving. You don't get that feeling again.”
I ask if there’s anywhere he wants to go next, if there’s a place that’s at the top of his list. He stares into the distance for about 12 seconds.
“I’ve never been to Hawaii.”
In Nettspend’s world, this past year was huge. And 2025 is already shaping up to be even bigger.
“It’s going by quick,” he says, with surprising wistfulness. “Too quick.”
For the next few days, he’ll keep going to the studio. He doesn’t have any New York Fashion Week plans for this trip, but his team just locked down an even splashier opportunity: During Paris Fashion Week in March, Nettspend will make his runway debut for Miu Miu, the “little sister” brand of Miuccia Prada’s namesake label with a rising stock among Zoomers and menswear aficionados alike. (In recent seasons, pop star Troye Sivan and Oscar-nominated actor Willem Dafoe also made celebrity cameos on the brand’s runway.)
On the runway in Paris, Nett—with the ends of his shaggy, peroxide-blond hair dyed a harsh, inky black—will model a tailored wool tracksuit and razor-thin eyeglasses; afterward, he’ll meet A$AP Rocky and Mrs. Prada herself. (He likes the French capital for pretty much the same reasons he likes New York City. There, he eats ice cream, rides bikes. “I don't know. Just stuff I can't do in the US.”) Days later, he and Rocky will both travel to LA for another rollicking iteration of Rolling Loud California, where Nett—his fingernails still painted silver from the Miu Miu show—will arrive backstage in an American-flag-wrapped limousine, prompting a music-news-aggregator Instagram account called Underground Rap Plug to determine, “Guys I think Nettspend is not underground anymore 💔.” And a few days after that, Nettspend will descend from a helicopter into his 18th birthday party at a LA penthouse.
He has made other inroads into the fashion world, too. The hype around him, in tandem with his androgynous looks—both of which have gotten him compared to Kurt Cobain—led to a gig modeling Smashing Pumpkins–inspired streetwear for Heaven by Marc Jacobs, the designer brand’s youth-skewed sublabel, which frequently riffs on Gen X culture to appeal to Gen Z’s nondenominational nostalgia. (Speaking of: Last summer, Warner Music Group momentarily scrubbed a Nettspend track called “That One Song” from the internet, reportedly due to a clearance issue for sampling “Entombed” by Gen Z’s favorite nu metal band, Deftones, which Nett discovered thanks to “a girl he knew when he was 14.”)
In December, the Venice Beach designer and photographer Eli Russell Linnetz, who has outfitted the relevant likes of Rocky, Bieber, and Kendrick Lamar, shot Nettspend wearing his namesake brand’s Americana skate-rat fashion: jet-puffed sneakers, ankle-length jorts, cut-off tanks. “I kept hearing [Nettspend’s] name over and over again,” says Linnetz, who’d previously worked with Ken Carson, so he must have been “tapping into something.”
Nettspend returned to Linnetz’s studio to shoot the album artwork for Bad Ass F*cking Kid, an edgy interpolation on Madonna and Child featuring an armless model and a cigarette-smoking baby. A thinly veiled, and certainly upsetting, allusion to not being held when perhaps he should have been. (Midway through BAFK, on a song called “F*CK CANCER”—a title that ostensibly references the astrological sign rather than the disease—Nett makes his clearest reference to this generational strain: “On the phone with my mama, she said, ‘Don’t have no daughter’ / Talkin’ to my dad, he said, ‘Don't start no problems,’ but it was after you went and caused all the drama.”)
During the shoot, Nett played for the designer a then unreleased song called “Skipping Class,” which featured a then uncleared sample of the peak-Grimes Grimes song “Genesis,” which Nett wasn’t sure he’d get the green light for. But thankfully, Linnetz knows Grimes.
“I was like, ‘Oh, I'll just ask Grimes,’” says the designer, recounting that the Canadian singer (and erstwhile partner of Elon Musk) vaguely knew who Nettspend was: “I think people similarly have been telling her about him.”
Nettspend’s whole cohort, Linnetz tells me, “does in some way recall more something from like, the ’60s or ’70s Laurel Canyon where it's just like, ‘Oh, come through.’”
Though the designer tells me this over the phone, I raise my eyebrows. My brain bends at the comparison, as I try to envision Nettspend living in a very, very, very fine house with two cats in the yard.
“But Laurel Canyon, like, flipped completely on its head,” I offer.
“No yeah, no, in the most fucked-up way possible,” Linnetz concedes, laughing. But still, he says, Nett “has such an insane aura and energy and, like, he had such an unusual presence that I was really impressed by. [He’s] like, equally connected to the universe and also dissociative. It seems like there's something spiritual going on.”
At this point, a critical mass of actual grown-ups—record-label execs, fashion designers, cultural critics—have not only taken note of Nettspend’s aura, but chosen to invest their money and their influence in him. The inroads have been carved for this hyper-online scene of profoundly parent-alienating music to cross over into the mainstream, and Nett has been anointed as its cherubic face.
At Lucien, Nett is starting to seem antsy. He tells me about the shopping he’s been doing here in the city, including the new-acquisition sunglasses. His personal style—expensive streetwear, skinny jeans—is another thing his fans obsess over.
He says he got into clothing through his homies, and while he certainly cares about designer goods, he seems agnostic to the idea of fashion. “My friends, they just showed me. That's how I really started getting into it. I wasn't really into fashion. I didn't know about fashion. I just knew about certain little things,” he says. “Just what I like. Certain things that my eye would like. That's how I got into it, just looking at stuff.”
“They definitely don’t got this watch,” he says, flashing his wrist. “It’s an A.P. Chandelier.” The first big thing he bought was a car for his mom. He has a car, too, a Mercedes-AMG G63, in Los Angeles, though he never drives it.
“If you haven't taken your driver's test, go take it,” he advises, to no one in particular. The conversation drops out again. The din of the restaurant takes over.
Suddenly, Nett glances at Nolan.
“This place is overstimulating me,” he mumbles. “I can’t even breathe in this bitch!”
The room is loud. Glasses clinking. Patrons shouting over bumping French house music. Waitstaff doing air-traffic control: “Beep, beep, beep! Coming through!” Lucien being Lucien. Still, the guys maintain, this is the spot. “All of my friends go here, so that's how I know about it,” Nett explains. “We would just be posting here at night, just chilling.”
There’s a beat, and then a bit of a shuffle. Leaving behind a mostly full plate of buttered noodles, Nett excuses himself to go outside again, this time for good. Nolan heads out after him, as the rapper retreats to the black SUV still parked outside.
His friends Bryce and Nick hang back, still working on their meals. “We’ve known him before this,” Bryce tells me, referring to the general this of Nettspend’s new life: the all-night studio sessions, the magazine interviews, the on-the-label steak dinners. Having already heard some of it, they’re just as excited about their friend’s new music as Nett’s fans are, and they utilize our Nett-free time to hype up his freshly baked tracks and ask me what my favorite songs are.
A few minutes later, Nolan returns. He plops down into the booth, grabs a fork, and starts eating the leftover pasta off of Nett’s abandoned plate.
“These butter noodles is low-key hitting,” he sighs. “The Nettspend order right here.”
