EST Gee

March 3, 2021 at PST

Real As It Gets (feat. EST Gee) - Single

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April 15, 2021 at PDT

Lick Back - Single

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November 19, 2020 at PST

Special Remix (feat. Moneybagg Yo) - Single

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April 7, 2022 at PDT

Last Ones Left

Rising MCs 42 Dugg and EST Gee may have declared themselves the Last Ones Left on their latest LP, but contextualizing what that means for the uninitiated isn’t the easiest thing to do. “It's like a group of people that's a certain type of way,” EST Gee told Apple Music's Ebro Darden just ahead of the album’s release. “And it ain't a whole lot. So it ain't just speaking of me and Dugg specifically, but like the group of us. Like it might not be no more members like us after.”

Dugg and Gee, who hail from Detroit and Louisville respectively, built their fanbases over the past half decade in near lockstep, frequently appearing in the same playlists and also guesting on each other’s projects and those of peers they both enjoy. “We got so many songs together,” Gee says. “Both of us is artists in demand—in our general area, it's like a tie, Michigan and Kentucky. So it just makes sense.”

With Last Ones Left’s robust 17 tracks, it’s clear the two enjoy making music with each other and are operating on a very similar wavelength. The project contains a handful of back-and-forth verses that express, in tandem, a penchant for forging their own mythology (“Spin,” “All 100s,” “Can’t Be Fucked With,” “Who Hotter Than Gee”), fair warning to their detractors (“Skcretch Sum,” “Everybody Shooters Too”), a considered regard for the people who look up to them (“My Yungin”), and a shared longing for loved ones locked behind bars (“Free the Shiners,” “Free Zoski”).

Though they were unable to coordinate for the interview—Dugg, allegedly having missed three separate flights, dialed in by phone from a Prada store—they know each other well enough that Gee was able to predict (before Dugg joined the call) that he’d name the riotous “Thump Shit” as his favorite song from the project. “That's his theme song,” Gee said. “He wake up in the morning, they just start playing it over his house, as soon as he get up out of the bed.” Dugg confirmed it just as soon as he got on the phone. “If I was wrong, I was going to leave,” Gee added. But he wasn’t, so he didn’t. And they’d have one more thing to joke about the next time they got back in the studio with each other.

20 Tracks

February 23, 2021 at PST

I Still Dont Feel Nun (Video Version)

26 Tracks

December 17, 2020 at PST

I Still Dont Feel Nun

16 Tracks

September 15, 2022 at PDT

I Never Felt Nun

EST Gee’s I Never Felt Nun is a continuation of a mixtape series that began in 2020 with Ion Feel Nun, continued with I Still Don’t Feel Nun), and, in 2022, finds that same detachment maybe stronger than ever. Feelings, however—or a pronounced lack thereof in Gee’s case—aren’t wholly indicative of self-awareness, and the MC knows exactly who he is across I Never Felt Nun.

EST Gee stands proudly atop his own street general mythology on songs like “Shoot It Myself,” “Hell,” and “Both Arms.” He’s cranked his aggression up to about an 11 (at least) for veritable war hymns like “Come Home,” “Bow and Say Grace,” and “Blood,” but there’s plenty of wisdom to absorb from songs like “Have Mercy,” “I Can’t Feel a Thing,” and “Is Heaven for a Gangsta.” He disarms, if only briefly, for the Bryson Tiller collab “Sabotage” and perhaps the grizzliest love song in recent memory, “Double Back,” but closes out the tape with “The Realest,” a clear celebration of the countless hands he’s won with the cards he was dealt.

21 Tracks

March 5, 2020 at PST

Ion Feel Nun

11 Tracks

December 2, 2021 at PST

Bigger Than Life Or Death, Pt. 2

8 Tracks

July 6, 2022 at PDT

Steppers (feat. EST Gee, Mozzy, Blac Youngsta & CMG The Label) - Single

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August 17, 2023 at PDT

EL TORO 2

EL TORO 2 is a sequel to the Louisville MC’s 2019 breakthrough project, but it’s also illustrative of how far he has come as a songwriter and artist. The growl, the dead-eyed stare, and the rumbling delivery remain, but he supplements these now-signature traits with catchy choruses, lavish celebrations of success, and honest looks at the exhilarating highs and depressing lows of fame. In short, it showcases a new era of Gee: a more mature, versatile rapper unafraid of stretching his perceived comfort zone into uncharted territories.

Gee still knows what got him here, though. “TURN THE STREETS UP” finds the artist back in his classical period, queueing up a bass-heavy beat with bleary synths that sound like too many long nights watching the corner. Gee drops some instantly classic lines, like when he laments that he’s “smoking cigarettes in the foreign, burning my seat leather.” Elsewhere, though, Gee tries on new flows, or, as he probably would put it, adds some fresh minks to the closet.

“A MOMENT WITH GOTTI” is a classic mentor-mentee cut, with Gee recruiting his new label boss (Yo Gotti) to reflect on how far they’ve each come in the game. “A MOMENT WITH GEE,” though similar in spirit, finds the MC spitting over a dusty soul sample that sounds more familiar to the Griselda universe than EST’s. But that’s what makes EL TORO 2 so effective: Gee spends the duration of the project reminding why he’s so beloved while giving ample new reasons to bump him up the rap power rankings.

20 Tracks

March 29, 2022 at PDT

Everybody Shooters Too - Single

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March 16, 2023 at PDT

MAD

Plenty changed in EST Gee’s life between his run of beloved, self-issued introductory mixtapes —including 2019’s El Toro and the following year’s Ion Feel Nun—and the release of 2023’s MAD. He signed to CMG, the imprint founded by the Memphis legend Yo Gotti—a pioneer for Gee’s model of introspective but club-conscious hip-hop, released at a constant, steady clip. He scored a major hit with Last Ones Left, his 2022 collaboration with the Detroit rapper 42 Dugg. And he’d learned to push his style to intriguing extremes, his vocals growing deeper and more jagged, his writing cutting ever closer to the bone. So it’s little surprise when MAD opens with a song title like “PRAY YOU DIE IN SURGERY”—a name that, from a lesser rapper, might seem like a stunt or cheap provocation, but from EST Gee simply communicates the fury and pain that colors everything he writes.

None of which is to suggest MAD is uniformly serious or somber. A track after “SURGERY,” Gee is riffing on the Shirley Bassey sample Kanye West had previously flipped for “Diamonds From Sierra Leone”; the instinctive, try-anything ethos of the 2000s mixtape makes his confessional raps feel as if they’re coming straight from a therapy session. When he raps, on “25MIN FREESTYLE,” that “I don’t feel anxious, I don’t feel fear/My heart cold, that’s why I buried it,” you believe that Gee believes it—for the moment, at least, before the next memory comes barrelling to the front of his mind.

It’s fitting that, for “HOTBOYS,” Gee tapped Boosie Badazz, the icon from Baton Rouge. Like Gee, Boosie has forged a career writing profoundly, sometimes shockingly honest songs that remain anchored to a sense of brightness and community—Boosie through his intermittent bursts of joy, Gee through the buoyancy of his production. While MAD is an exploration of EST Gee’s psyche in the manner his listeners have come to expect, it also feels meaningfully connected to the world outside his skull.

19 Tracks

June 6, 2021 at PDT

Bigger Than Life Or Death - Single

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December 16, 2021 at PST

Bigger Than Life Or Death (Deluxe)

When EST Gee’s Bigger Than Life or Death, Pt. 2 dropped in December 2021, the Kentucky MC’s profile had never been higher, having featured on songs by Mozzy, Tory Lanez, and Moneybagg Yo—not to mention having a certified smash of his own in “5500 Degrees.” The project itself, though, may have been slightly overshadowed by Gee’s continually increasing popularity and role as one of the most dependable breadwinners on Yo Gotti’s talent-packed CMG label. In the interest of giving Pt. 2 its just due, Gee has rereleased both installments in a deluxe version, adding three bonus tracks to boot. Guests on the new songs are a few of street rap’s most in-demand voices, including Moneybagg Yo (“Balloons”), Future (“Dead Wrong”), and the CMG bossman himself, Yo Gotti (“What It Is”).

36 Tracks

February 23, 2023 at PST

Undefeated - Single

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November 18, 2021 at PST

Lamborghini Geeski - Single

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June 24, 2021 at PDT

Capitol 1 - Single

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July 28, 2022 at PDT

Blood - Single

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September 29, 2022 at PDT

Fight That Switch (Walk) - Single

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August 11, 2022 at PDT

Love Is Blind - Single

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June 21, 2019 at PDT

El Toro

For an artist whose music is so suffused with urgency, EST Gee has staked his career on remarkable patience. From the opening song of his debut mixtape, 2019’s El Toro, the Louisville native gives off the air of someone willing to bide his time—to lay in wait for years until presented with an opportunity to right wrongs visited upon himself and others, to settle grudges that simmer but never evaporate, to enact the plans he never shared with anybody else. So on “The King,” the track that served as his introduction to the world, the distant and recent past blur—his embarrassment at the times he couldn’t help lift his friends out of poverty, his pride at the expansion of an interstate trafficking network—into a map of raw ambition, where each desperate, isolated incident becomes one step in a long, near-mythic journey.

Vocally, Gee charts a middle course between the ultra-animation of Kevin Gates and the affected monotone of mid- and late-period Future. But he works in the same lineage, reliving the process of traumatization, processing, healing, and retraumatization on endless loop. Early on El Toro, Gee references the Greeks, though the framework could just as easily be Freudian for the way old injuries bleed into the present.

An economical, sometimes unnervingly spare writer, Gee takes this long view throughout the moody but kinetic record. In “2015, I made in minutes what they make a week,” he raps on “On the Island,” before hitting listeners with a pair of hairpin reversals: “2016, I hit a lick and made like twenty G’s/2018, karma came, it brought me to my knees.” But when he zooms into a single scene, the details are striking. Gee senses a rival respects him because of the way he mumbles during a conversation (“El Toro”); he specifies which drug packages he used to conceal inside which parts of his wardrobe (“No Talking”); he describes, twice, the dread that swells up inside him as he watches a closed door, waiting for it to open. The effect is not to make these warring senses of destiny and anxiety seem like frequent recurrences, but rather to make them seem permanent.

20 Tracks

March 21, 2022 at PDT

Free The Shiners - Single

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January 27, 2022 at PST

Who Hotter Than Gee - Single

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