“I’ve got to tailor my style in a way that’s just like, you can’t trace it and can’t detect it,” Lanez told Apple Music about how he pulls his sound together. His first album, I Told You, came out in 2016 two more- MEMORIES DON’T DIE and LoVE me NOw-followed in 2018, amidst high-profile features with Future, Sean Paul, Rick Ross, and Ty Dolla $ign. Lanez quickly established himself as prolific and hard-hustling, kicking out as many as four mixtapes a year, demonstrating an unusual versatility as both a singer and a rapper. His break came in 2009, when a string of self-directed videos he’d uploaded to YouTube caught the attention of Justin Bieber and Sean Kingston, the latter of whom gave Lanez a shot at a deal.
Born Daystar Peterson in 1992, Lanez bounced around as a kid (Toronto, Montreal, Miami, Atlanta) before settling in Toronto in his early teens.
Like his occasional sparring partner Drake, the rapper-singer-producer Tory Lanez is a natural omnivore, an artist who manages to soak up sounds from across the spectrum of hip-hop-from ’90s slow jams to 2010s trap, Caribbean dancehall to Canadian R&B-and spin it into something uniquely his own.
