Within hip-hop’s increasingly complex constellation of celebrity, producers are now almost as beloved as rappers. At home, we feverishly catalog their beats; online, we make them into memes; in the club, we scream their drops. If a producer doesn’t have a drop in 2016, do they even exist? In the case of Ebony Oshunrinde, the young producer better known as WondaGurl, the answer is very much yes.

ADVERTISEMENT

I first met Oshunrinde four years ago, at a listening party in Toronto thrown by the rapper Rich Kidd. Though she was clearly more comfortable standing off to the side, Rich made sure everyone there knew who was responsible for the calamitous drums on “Money Money,” his single with Vancouver rapper SonReal. A few months later, two weeks before her 16th birthday, the quiet girl in the corner bested over 30 aspiring producers in a local Battle of the Beat Makers competition. The following summer, she became a flashpoint in the news cycle surrounding Jay Z’s Magna Carta Holy Grail after co-producing “Crown,” a pummeling, post-Yeezus-era Sizzla flip. She wasn’t yet a high school senior.

Oshunrinde’s suburban hometown of Brampton, Ontario, is downright quaint compared to brassy Los Angeles, where the now 19-year-old is temporarily logging studio time, doing sessions with Big Sean and Travis Scott. When we catch up on the phone, she’s friendly and upbeat but clearly still uninterested in the self-promoting side of modern life as a musician. All she wants to talk about is making beats.