Abstract has a knack for masking parts of his biography and mythologizing others, the latest in a long line of American figures who believe total reinvention is a right. When I asked him the benign question of what his parents did for work when he was growing up, he told me he didn't want to say. After I shot him a confused look, he admitted that his mom now “runs some kind of motel in Louisiana.” He is also attracted to cliches of Americana and youth. The video for “Empty,” which he directed himself, takes place in a Stranger Things-y suburb and finds him getting head from a fully-uniformed football player to the shock of the athlete’s girlfriend. “I don’t know what it is that I love so much about high school, but I’m attached,” he said. “The empty hallways. The teachers. They made me feel so much. Even if [some of it] was bad.”

These days, he lives in a house in South Central, Los Angeles, with a group of 12 friends he mostly met online. They are in a hip-hop boy band called Brockhampton and have released a couple of playful videos. “It’s always been my dream to come to L.A.,” he said, lighting up like an ingenue. He is single at the moment, doesn’t drink or smoke, and told me he is so reluctant to leave the house that his manager once sent groceries through a delivery service just to get him to eat. “I’m so anxious,” he said of his reclusiveness, sounding as if he genuinely does not realize that he isn’t the first 20-year-old to wear his social anxiety as a cloak of cool-kid outsiderness.

