In late May, tee*zo Touchdown — clad in all-black leather, spiky silver nails piercing his shoulder pads — leaped across the stage of Los Angeles’ Fonda Theatre. As he performed his groovy 2023 song “Mood Swings,” he screeched helium-pitched “Wee!” ad-libs mid-air, and a vibrant flower bouquet encasing his microphone swung along with him.
“A night at Lil Yachty’s house” inspired his mic setup, tee*zo says today as he periodically munches on a raw orange carrot that matches the couch he’s lounging on. tee*zo and Yachty were marathoning Morrissey music videos, and the way the former Smiths frontman nonchalantly swung a bouquet of flowers in the “This Charming Man” video “really influenced” tee*zo — so much so that the avant-garde 31-year-old rapper-meets-rock star eventually made it his own.
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He has now whirled that microphone onstage at the country’s biggest arenas and stadiums, thanks to opening gigs for Tyler, The Creator in 2022 (after featuring on Tyler’s “RunItUp”) and Travis Scott in 2023 (after appearing on Scott’s UTOPIA track “Modern Jam”). “Being an opener is so hard,” tee*zo admits — but he gained valuable perspective playing for early arrivers interested in the main act.
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“I’m like the doorman welcoming you into Tyler’s crib, Travis’ crib: ‘Can I grab you anything? He’ll be down shortly. But while you here, let me entertain you,’” he explains. That attitude has also informed tee*zo’s recent guest appearances on tracks by artists including Drake, Doja Cat and Don Toliver — A-list collaborations that launched him onto the Billboard Hot100 with “Amen,” from Drake’s 2023 album, For All the Dogs, marking tee*zo’s highest-charting entry, at No.15.
“tee*zo is your favorite artist’s favorite artist,” says his manager, Amal Noor, who has worked with him since 2019. “He respects these artists’ careers, and to know that they love him creatively is an amazing feeling.”
Following his own first headlining tour last spring, which came on the heels of his 2023 debut album, How Do You Sleep at Night?, Billboard’s 2024 R&B/Hip-Hop Rookie of the Year is still coming to terms with his current level of stardom. “I can still go to Whole Foods and grab my six hard-boiled eggs or go to Paris and walk the streets, and no one bats an eye,” he says. “But on the other end, I’m on the biggest albums in the world, biggest tours.”
Long before he became tee*zo Touchdown, the artist born Aaron Lashane Thomas followed in the footsteps of his father, a DJ and avid music collector, and started DJ’ing in the second grade, performing at friends’ parties, weddings and graduations in his hometown of Beaumont, Texas. “Every year, I would get something music-related for Christmas, but in seventh grade, I got this small box. There was a key inside to the studio that my dad had built for me upstairs,” he says. tee*zo made his first song ever that day — and he still plays the piano riff at studios he visits “to call back to that kid on Christmas, like, ‘Look where you at right now.’”
Tragedy affected his trajectory early on. After his girlfriend was fatally shot in 2016, tee*zo channeled his grief into his art, and in February 2019, he dropped the somber single “100Drums,” which decried gun violence over a sample of Panic! at the Disco’s emo smash “I Write Sins Not Tragedies.” Chance the Rapper and Trippie Redd both noticed, and the latter flew him out to L.A. for the first time the following month. Noor noticed, too: After seeing a clip of the “100Drums” music video on a meme page, she also reached out to tee*zo.
While spending time at his childhood home afterward, tee*zo stumbled upon his father’s toolbox. “Punks are usually spiky. My dad had nails around the crib, and I was like, ‘This is going to be my spike,’” he says. In March 2020, tee*zo asked his best friend to braid the nails into his hair for the first time, for his “Strong Friend” music video. “I think I was meant to find [the nails],” tee*zo says, adding that he has comfortably slept with them in his hair multiple times.
His unorthodox image complemented his developing sound, which he now describes as “R&B with the boom of rock.” He didn’t think he could meld those genres until he saw the Afropunk festival’s Instagram post about Black rock band Living Colour and his producers, Brendan Grieve and Hoskins, played him a mashup of Craig David and metalcore band Killswitch Engage.
How Do You Sleep at Night? (released last September on Not Fit for Society/RCA Records) showcases tee*zo’s genre-defying talents — from the garage punk-meets-R&B anthem “Too Easy” to the guitar-driven indie-rock jam “Impossible.” It failed to crack the Billboard200, but tee*zo only cares about the numbers for one reason: “I’m so obsessed with numbers because I just want to make my team proud. I’m proud because I’m making music and one person knows who I am.”
Drake called How Do You Sleep at Night? “some of the best music ever” when tee*zo played it for him a month early. But ironically, tee*zo’s profile expanded even further when Kendrick Lamar name-dropped him in the opening lines of his Hot100 No.1 Drake diss track, “Not Like Us” (“Nail a n—a to the cross/He walk around like tee*zo”). Having just started his own tour (a “little bubble” filled with “loving fans”) at the time, “I made a decision that I wasn’t going to listen to any of the back-and-forth,” says tee*zo, who claims to have somehow avoided listening to the inescapable “Not Like Us” in its entirety. “I’m seeing a mob mentality, and I don’t like division. Sorry I’m so kumbaya, but it’s all love over here.” The simple fact that both Drake and Lamar “know who I am… it’s still one of those moments where you have to pinch yourself. The kid in Beaumont, I’m pretty sure he’s jumping through the roof right now.”
Come October, tee*zo will hit the road again on Don Toliver’s North American arena tour — an opportunity he initially hesitated to take because he wanted to focus on making his next album. But “[Don] was like, ‘tee*zy, I’m telling you. If you know you got a tour coming up, it’s going to make you lock in.’ I needed a fire under me, and that was the fire.”
And it’s working: tee*zo has already started on his next project. “The word that [we] keep bringing up is ‘undeniable.’ Everything that we’re making, is it undeniable?” he says. “If it’s not, put a red mark on it and let’s move on to the next.”
This story appears in the Aug. 31, 2024, issue of Billboard.
