He began “keystyling” - imagine a rap battle, typed out - on websites like Black Planet. Soul pored over their labyrinthine rhymes, obsessing over double and triple-entendre. As soon as his security detail arrives, he unfolds his lanky frame from the Tesla and walks, with a slight limp, over some gentle hills toward a cement picnic table. And yet he betrays no nervousness: He seems calm, centered, and eager to talk about his career, which pieces of regional styles do and do not bleed across state lines, even the chronology of some of his tattoos. Until promotion for Herbert began, he had appeared on a total of eight songs since Donald Trump took office.

Even by the glacial standards of Top Dawg Entertainment, the independent label he signed to in 2008, Soul has been out of sight and mind. He’s here to give his first proper interview in many years, in advance of his fifth album, Herbert, the first new LP he’ll release in more than six years. But there are neglected stretches without commercial or residential development, and freeways snake in every direction, bisecting neighborhoods and pumping smog into the air. “Because it is a suburb, but it’s got all the other stuff, too.” And yet, as is typical of neighborhoods in the southern half of the county, it doesn’t look precisely like either: There are plenty of single-family homes, and some of the lawns sit pristine and manicured. “I kinda like to call it the ghetto suburb,” the rapper, 35, says from the open back seat of a Tesla SUV. We’re close to the houses he grew up in alongside his mother, aunts, and paternal grandparents. In the parking lot of Anderson Memorial Park in Carson, California, just south of Compton and north of Long Beach, Ab-Soul chain-smokes Newports and speaks gently.

Ab soul album covers