Everyone in Europe seems to know Tommy Cash, within a few degrees of separation. When I started talking about interviewing him a couple of years ago, every Estonian I met would tell me a story about running into the rapper at a party. I thought that was weird but not impossible—Estonia, after all, is a country of only 1.37 million. Then I got to talking with a barman in a central London chain pub. “Oh, Tommy,” he said, “I got high with him once.” The barman has never been to Estonia in his life. Of course, any (or all) of these people could be lying, but it's easier to entertain the idea of Cash casting a web in the night, the only common denominator among perfect strangers.

When I call Cash in late November, he’s at the airport in Paris, having just finished work on his new studio album, ¥€$. Before I know it, he’s asking me questions about my reaction to his latest music video for the Danny L Harle–produced track "X-Ray," one that depicts Cash as a techno cult leader of sorts. I tell him I thought it was spooky, which he finds kind of amusing. “But I went easy on this one!” he says (previous videos, in comparison, have featured disabled dancers sporting blades instead of prosthetics; others sport Cash’s face superimposed onto every character). “I thought it was more emotional and less dark than the previous ones. But then,” he adds, more seriously, “for me, very light things can be spooky.”

Tommy Cash was born Tomas Tammemets in 1991 to a Russian father and a Ukrainian mother. He grew up in a predominantly Russian neighborhood in Tallinn, Estonia, and was into dance before he was into music. A childhood hip-hop class sparked an interest in making his own beats. He left school at 17, briefly attended art college, then left that too to focus on his interest in performance. He released his first album, Euroz Dollaz Yeniz, in 2014 and rapidly gained fame in underground Baltic and Eastern European circles—and then internationally, too, thanks to the viral success of his self-produced 2016 music video for the single “Winaloto.”

He came up during (or perhaps because of) a wave of interest in the “post-Soviet aesthetic” but says he has a complicated relationship with that label. A better way to put it is that the label itself is complicated. "Post-Soviet" was based on the romanticized "otherness" of the former satellite states. It was often conflated, too, with a blue-collar sensibility, partly because of socioeconomic assumptions and partly because its rise coincided with an industry’s renewed interest in “street” culture and the working classes. Terms like “raw” and “real” were thrown around loosely. It's not an association Cash says he consciously cultivated; in fact, he finds the continued probing into his childhood, as well as the (incorrect) allusions that he grew up "on the wrong side of the tracks," tiresome. “Every time people ask me about growing up in Tallinn and my name and my parents, a little part of my soul dies,” he says.

Estonia broke away from the USSR during the Soviet coup of 1991, the year Cash was born. The economic and cultural realities of the ’90s that are central to the post-Soviet aesthetic had little bearing on him, but that's not to say that he hasn’t adopted them when it's convenient. When he speaks, his accent is firmly Estonian, but in his songs he often has a Slavic twang, softening his T's and N's. “I got huge ears, big eyes, call me Cheburashka,” he sings on his 2018 single, “Pussy Money Weed,” referring to the Soviet children’s cartoon. On ¥€$, he hums the "ski-ba-bop-ba-dop-bop" bit (you know the one) from the Scatman classic that was widely mixed by Euro-dance DJs in the '90s.

But the misunderstanding behind the idea of the post-Soviet aesthetic so often ascribed to Cash was that there was an assumed insider knowledge that existed among artists, while for the most part, '90s kids in Eastern Europe grew up not that differently from '90s kids elsewhere, influenced by pop charts and American hip-hop and the Internet. Cash’s subtle genius is that he managed to nail down his own sound within a more global sphere, while also still repping an entire culture for a generation that was taught to look for escapism elsewhere.