His public behavior since his release has toggled between earnest interactions with gobsmacked fans captured on social media — something many SoundCloud artists excel at, communicating directly to their audience in their language — and less savory choices, like tweeting the apparent home address of a rival, or saying impolite things about Drake’s mother in retribution for Drake seeming to have borrowed his “Look at Me” rhyme patterns on a recent song.

Before he went to jail, he was on the same popularity level as many of his generational peers, but now, seemingly in large part because of his outlaw reputation, his fame is growing the fastest. On his current tour, while a potential criminal trial looms for the aggravated battery charge, he is performing to more than 1,000 people a night; online, T-shirts, skateboard decks and iPhone cases with his mug shot abound. In one example of cross-promotion, XXXTentacion was handed the keys to SoundCloud’s Snapchat during Rolling Loud, but a representative for the streaming service declined to further detail how the company had directly worked with these artists. (XXXTentacion’s representatives declined to make him available for an interview.)

Though these rappers operate on the fringes of the hip-hop mainstream, they are not without antecedent. They are the bad-boy junior league of the genre’s emerging psychedelic era, inheritors of experimentalists like Lil Uzi Vert, Young Thug and the internet-rap hero Chief Keef. And in some ways, this is a regional scene passing for an internet phenomenon: Most of the crucial artists and producers hail from the Miami area. The sound’s aesthetic lineage is traceable through several of that city’s micromovement stars over the last few years — Spaceghostpurrp and the Raider Klan, Denzel Curry, Yung Simmie, Fat Nick and Pouya.