When it appeared in October of last year, MENACE seemed to come out of nowhere. Credited to an artist named NappyHIGH, the album features an impressive array of guests, ranging from OGs like Raekwon to the cream of the current crop, head-of-class rappers like Blu, G Perico, and Westside Gunn. The sounds are bright and buoyant, full of the lightly psychedelic feeling you get from combining a hefty microdose with a beautiful sunny day. Tracks like “Gangsta” marry crispy drums and trap-adjacent hi-hats with sweeping Philly soul romanticism, while “10k Hrs” felt similar to the smoky, introspective jazz rap Kev Brown mined on I Do What I Do. Occasionally, Menace took interesting and unexpected detours, flirting with disco on “TheTrip” and quiet storm boogie on “ChiliFritos.” It was lush, it knocked heavily, and felt incredibly sure of itself. Most of all, it begged the question: Who is NappyHIGH?
Channy Cardenas, the man behind the moniker, was born in Fresno, a mid-size city in California’s San Joaquin Valley. He spent the first few years of his childhood in Los Angeles, but moved to Palmdale, a desert exurb of about 170,000 people just north of L.A., when he was around nine. Despite the hour-plus commute to get anywhere in Los Angeles, Cardenas, now 31, never really felt the pull to leave. “L.A. is our backyard so we’re there all the time,” he says. “It’s cheaper to live here [and] everybody knows each other.” When we speak over the phone, he gives off a calm, humble energy, serenely comfortable with both who and where he is.
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While the name NappyHIGH may initially scan as cheeky, it has a deep meaning for Cardenas. “Nappy, the first half of my name, [came from] a nickname,” he explains. “When my hair grows out, it’s a nappy fro, naturally.” As a teen, he’d regularly stay up until four in the morning working on music, inevitably falling asleep in class the next day; so the “Nappy” sobriquet from his peers soon took on a double meaning. The “HIGH” part of his artist name came much later. In October 2016, Cardenas’s mom was involved in a fatal bus accident. None of the passengers survived. “After that…I didn’t want to hold on to being the ‘introverted producer,’” he says. “I just wanted to let go. After I decided that, in my mind, I felt super high, free from chains.”
It was then that he decided to start taking music seriously. He’d been making beats since he was 16, but hadn’t considered it a viable career path. Losing his mother in such a sudden, tragic way opened his eyes: “Tomorrow is not promised for me or anyone, so I figured, ‘Why am I waiting? Why am I holding on to my art?’” He began trying in earnest to work with people he admired, realizing that the worst-case scenarios—artists saying ‘no,’ people not hearing the music—weren’t enough to keep him from expressing himself. “It doesn’t matter, because [I’d] still [be] doing what I want to do.” Simply jamming was, and remains, the most important thing in Cardenas’s mind. “He really is a person making music for himself,” says Austin Hart, aka L’Orange, who’s been reissuing all of NappyHIGH’s work through his label, Old Soul Music. “If you put him on an island, you’d come back 100 years later and just find thousands of beats there. He’d still be compelled to create even in a vacuum.”
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You can feel that insatiable creativity, that hunger, when listening through Cardenas’s discography. Since the release of WeekDaze in 2020, a tape full of three-dimensional beats and impressive turns from guests like Curren$y, Mick Jenkins, Memnoc, and Elzhi, he’s dropped another six albums with plans for at least two more this year. So far, his work slots into one of two distinct series, one named after colors (Orange, Yellow, Green, and Burgundy) and a trilogy of grittier records (Villains, Menace, and eventually Hoodlum, which Cardenas is currently working on). The colors series originally started as a way to document his looser experiments, the stuff that feels more akin to KAYTRANADA and L.A. beat fixtures like Teebs and Flying Lotus than the explicit Madlib or Dilla influence of his more straightforward hip-hop tracks.
No matter his mindset, Cardenas’s music has immense breadth and covers a vast amount of styles. “I like to think of myself as a multi-genre producer,” he says. “I can make funk, boogie, house, or straight, raw hip-hop.” When looking for samples, he wants to find “something with soul.” Not necessarily soul music per se, but something that stirs a particular, ineffable feeling within him. Once that happens, the music makes itself. “When I hear the sample, I hear the track already,” he tells me. “I hear who I want on the song before I’ve even made the beat.” He likens himself to a movie director especially adept at worldbuilding, carefully choosing people who bring the right kind of depth.
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That unwavering confidence in his own vision has resulted in some choice collaborations. His albums feature some of the biggest names in rap right now, including Griselda members Benny the Butcher, Conway the Machine, and Boldy James. He doesn’t credit ladder-climbing networking for securing such huge features, though. Instead, he prefers to develop relationships with artists and managers outside of the music world, recording together being the unexpected bonus of a new friendship. “Most of the time, we’re not even talking about music,” he asserts. “We’re just talking about life, our hobbies. Later on, they’re like ‘This dude is actually talented,’ so we work.”
There’s a beautiful simplicity to his outlook: Never take anything for granted. Losing his mom presented him with a choice: fold further into himself or appreciate everything for what it is. “I [speak] to [my friends] like it’s gonna be my last time talking to them,” he says. “Even you—I appreciate you taking the time because I don’t know if this is the last time we’re gonna speak.” So as his star rises thanks to the guidance and support from Old Soul Music, as he notches work with legends in the game, he remains thankful he gets to do it at all. Menace, his highest-profile work to date, has racked up close to a million plays since its release. “I appreciate every one of those plays,” he tells me, a slight note of surprise coloring his voice. “So I just gotta keep going and see from there.”
