808MeloBeats (formerly 808 Melo), who produced every song on “Meet the Woo,” is from London, and his music is dark, moody and fast. “U.S. music is usually more slow,” he said. “My sound has more of a bounce to it.” Pop Smoke, who has a disarmingly gravelly tone, “has the right flow for both,” 808MeloBeats said.

After securing a couple of outfits at Patron of the New, Pop Smoke (born Bashar Jackson) slipped behind the wheel of his navy Range Rover for a drive out to Canarsie. “You going to see a lot of flossing — a lot of young kids, they look rich,” he said of the Brooklyn neighborhood where he spent much of his childhood, the child of Panamanian and Jamaican parents. “They got cars, designer bags, designer belts, designer sneakers. They get a lot of money over there.” In local parlance, Canarsie is called “The Flossy.”

On the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, he took a call from a real estate agent about seeing a house for sale the next morning, while he and his crew engaged in what can only be described as defensive driving formations: rotating order, intermittently speeding up and slowing down, blocking other cars from their path. It was the type of behavior exhibited by those who are mindful that something unexpectedly awful could happen at any moment.

“I’m a big dog, you could tell,” Pop Smoke said. “Disrespect is not tolerated.” But that perspective was formed in a vicious caldron. When he was 13, he took a slap on a Brooklyn street, an incident that was filmed and ricocheted around social media.

“I’m glad it happened as a kid,” Pop Smoke said. “I realized it’s time to boss up — life ain’t sweet.” Now, he hopes to make music that speaks to young people like him, who “got to carry their guns to school because it ain’t safe, but they still got to make sure they get they diploma ’cause they mom could be happy. I do it for them.” (He said that he was kicked out of eighth grade for bringing a gun to school.)