An hour into our interview at his San Fernando Valley home, Elmo O’Connor posted a new song on Twitter. As Bones, he is known mostly for a goth style of rap, with dark lo-fi visuals and seething lyrics, but on this new track, “Encrypted,” he’s cheerily singing like Ariel Pink over tinkles of keyboard Muzak. The next day, he’ll return to form with an agitated rap, “Okay,ButThisIsTheLastTime,” which is followed hours later by “Iron,” the drone-like final song in what turns out to be a mixtape called Frayed, hosted on the SoundCloud page of his mysterious collective, TeamSESH.

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O’Connor, 21, releases music at a frenetic pace, churning out atmospheric fragments ritualistically and with indifference to quality. “Shitty raps forever,” he tells me, resting his lanky frame next to his girlfriend on their pool house’s green couch. His habit of constantly sharing songs goes back a decade, when an 11-year-old O’Connor would write rhymes on “big pieces of paper in big block letters that looked like shit, read like shit,” shout them at a mic hooked up to his computer, and play the tracks for friends. It was a cathartic process for a hip-hop-obsessed California native whose family had moved him at age 7 to a rural town 40 minutes outside of Detroit, where he was a clear misfit.

“Not much has changed,” he says, pausing to run a hand through his long hair and press a blunt to lips bordered by an Amish-looking beard. But just a few years after he started putting out music as Bones, today’s “shitty raps” are paying the bills on a nice house a few blocks away from his brother/manager and his parents, who followed their sons back to California. O’Connor’s short tracks, creepy videos, and one-word tweets rack up millions of social media interactions from a cult following that helped him sell out shows in 25 cities on a recent tour. The hip-hop elite is taking notice.