Most days, Atlanta’s Street Execs recording studio has a private, in-house chef on call to serve the culinary needs of the artists who record there. On one warm evening a couple days shy of Thanksgiving, though, the cooking isn’t for the artists who use it as a creative base—who include co-owner 2Chainz, as well as Travis Porter, Young Dolph, and Skooly—but for the local community. Tonight, the kitchen and lounge are starting to resemble a food bank, with long tables furnished with bagged loaves of bread. Rapper Bankroll Fresh, a signee to the label, is excited: not only is his company making a charitable contribution to the season by providing dinners on Thanksgiving Day to single-parent households, but he’ll also release his third mixtape, which is self-titled. In honor of this, he’s referring to the holiday as “Banksgiving.”

In a city full of stolen flows, in the past few years Bankroll Fresh has emerged as one of Atlanta’s newest, truest originals. In 2012 and 2013, signs had started to point toward the name 'Yung Fresh' (his prior alias), who’d put out a smattering of tracks, with his credit cropping up on a couple of not so memorable Gucci Mane songs (“Faces,” “Shooters”). Over the following year, a name change to Bankroll Fresh marked a transition: he forged links with the city’s premier producers, guesting on Future's "For The Love," from Metro Boomin's 19 & Boomin' compilation mixtape, and teaming with Mike Will on 2014’s “Screen Door.” Honing his flow, he crafted a viral hit of his own in “Hot Boy,” a minimal, lurking beat with lyrics inspired by early Cash Money (Balling like a hot boy, nigga Lil' Weezy/ Feeling like Birdman and Meechy), and which established him as a solo force.

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Though his thematic content rarely veered far from the beaten path of trap life, Bankroll’s characteristic rasp and stutter flows breathed a new freshness into it. Cosigns from outside the local scene rolled in for him, perhaps most passionately from Earl Sweatshirt, who wrote a number of tweets praising Bankroll’s rap style and anticipating mainstream swagger-jacking. As well as a recent namecheck from Erykah Badu, last year he got a bizarre shout out from Drake on a spring 2015 Instagram post which pictured goth-rock overlord Marilyn Manson, “I watched this guy go up to Bankroll Fresh tonight. Sydney is lit.”

In the context, his second breakout hit, “Walked In,” from last April’s Life Of A Hot Boy 2 mixtape, arrived somewhat unexpectedly. It’s a bouncy, function-friendly, highly dab-able song alone in an otherwise menacing trapping soundtrack of a mixtape. When I ask him if he anticipated the song’s success, he said “No. I just let the people decide.” Bankroll puts out the tape, and eventually a people’s choice hit surfaces from it, much like how Future’s “March Madness” and “Commas” rose from their respective tapes. In one of the professional studio rooms, we sit down to share a cup of cognac from a flask-sized bottle of Hennessy, and, after lighting his blunt from a miniature flamethrower, Bankroll speaks on his growing up in ATL’s west side, what it’s like when your five year old nephew is more famous than you, and how an unexpected encounter in New York’s Times Square affirmed that he was on the right path.



