The year’s most consistent new hip-hop star is DaBaby, who has built a quickly growing career on a combination of pulverizing energy, intense rhymes and buoyant songs. He’s also been very willing to embrace the meme economy, understanding himself as a musician and as an online character. He’s released two albums in 2019: “Baby on Baby,” which contained the breakout hit “Suge,” and “Kirk,” which recently debuted at the top of the Billboard album chart.

This week’s Popcast is a conversation about all the factors that have converged to fuel DaBaby’s ascent. Plus: A discussion of the recent Rolling Loud festival in Queens, the first New York iteration of the five-year-strong traveling hip-hop revue. DaBaby was one of the performers there, though his music was a little out of step with the rest of festival, which tended toward the psychedelic and the melodic.

On the Popcast: