Just one project into his journey, Cousin Stizz has the air of someone who’s worked his whole life for this moment. Except he hasn’t. How does that work?

Words: Khari Nixon

Dorchester, MA rapper Cousin Stizz catches his stride at a distinct point during “Bonds,” one of the salient tracks on his debut project, Suffolk County. “Rumors get started, you start getting blessed up/Breaking the work down, and smoking the extra,” raps Stizz, before alliterating his way through a seamless bar progression. “Bring ‘em to school and I talk ‘bout the work, I feel like a professor/Bringing to you but I don’t got no vessel/Dreaming of Teslas/We getting fed up, my n*ggas aggressive/Everyone slanging but my side the Mecca.” It’s a very deliberately structured verse, leaving no room for extra words, ad-libs or breaths, the type of technique street rappers don’t normally carry, at least not on their first offering to the world. Especially not a rapper who never dreamed of being a rapper, a rapper that never scribbled random couplets or hook ideas in a composite book as an adolescent. Guys like Cousin Stizz, who admittedly turned the key in the ignition of his rap career out of necessity, generally don’t touch down like this.

However, here he is, in New York’s Blast Off Studios, where Drake and Kendrick Lamar recorded bits of the debut albums that would make them stars, casually thumbing through beats on an otherwise uneventful April afternoon. By now, Suffolk County has made its rounds—internationally, might we add—and Cousin Stizz is no longer just the kid with the song (“Shoutout”) that soundtracked Drizzy’s 28th birthday party (“That sh*t was nuts, bro.”) He’s a formidable artist with enough clout to bring out Chance The Rapper for a surprise performance, and enough humility to double-down on a major co-sign. “That told me I gotta go harder. Or everything goes away.”

Stizz is succinct in Suffolk County’s mission—“It’s sh*t that really happened”—but doesn’t quite acknowledge how fun an album it is. “Shoutout,” a tropically tinged anthem about the love of money and drugs, is just the beginning. “No Bells” is a hit in the making and the project’s closer, “Jordan Fade,” finds Stizz “rolling up that fadeaway,” one of the more clever basketball concepts we’ve heard from an artist in a while. “I was just bullsh*tting with it for a while, it was just fun,” Stizz says of rapping before it became a career. “But then, you get older…” and Stizz trails off, mentioning not being receptive to working a 9-5 and the fact Dorcester’s shallow rap history didn’t deter him. “I never, ever thought just because someone else couldn’t do something I couldn’t do it.”