The construction noises are an annoying way to start the day. It’s afternoon, but as Kirk Knight emerges from the shower of the Bed-Stuy apartment where he’s staying the first week of November, he gives a little wince at the adenoidal screech of power drills, buzz saws, and belt sanders coming from the floor below, which is getting gut renovated by a team of jocular contractors blasting urbano hits from an old boombox. Our move to avoid the din would ordinarily be to just get out of the building, but it’s one of those classic fall days in Brooklyn, fucking cold and pissing rain. Besides, Kirk is still moving slowly, pulling a T-shirt over his head and taking up a seat at a plastic folding table – one of a small handful of pieces of furniture in the apartment.

Once he gets dressed and realises our interview isn’t going to be on video – which allows him to put away a backpack full of jewellery, and stop agonising over which chains to wear on camera – he settles into an excitable, slap-happy rhythm. He’s stoked about the time he’s spent in Europe, both now and on previous trips with Pro Era, the group of Brooklyn kids with whom he first rose to prominence a in the early part of this decade. He talks about those trips with the wide-eyed joy of college sophomore who’s just gotten back from a semester abroad, detailing mind-blowing raves and perspective shifting encounters with real life reminders of world history. “The architecture is like no other,” he says. “New York definitely has its culture and its swag, but it don’t got shit on the Gargoyles on the top of the towers in London and shit.”

Kirk acknowledges its not the most comfortable spot, but it has to do for now. Just yesterday the 22-year-old rapper, producer, and songwriter got back from a month on tour in Europe with his buds in Flatbush Zombies, and he gave up his lease on another place before he left. He got back in town yesterday “jetlagged beyond repair,” he says, and without a permanent place to live. Today, he’s waking up to the sounds of heavy machinery. That isn’t exactly the glamorous life you imagine of multi-platinum musicians, but that’s the reality of it. There are transitional days.

This is indicative, more broadly, of the process that Kirk Knight has been undergoing over the last couple of years. On November 9, just a few days after our interview, he released IIWII, his second solo album and his first in three years. Over that span, Kirk’s world has expanded quite a bit. He’d already tasted a not-insignificant amount of success as Pro Era, rising alongside Joey Bada$$ as a producer with a knack for turning gnarled sample flips into sneakily infectious underground anthems. But something unexpected happened last year when “Plain Jane” – a song he produced for A$AP Ferg – took the fuck off. It’s a simple, but effective beat, a slowly loping thing built around a clattering sample of the New York City subway and a foreboding synth loop that sounds kinda like Philip Glass’ piano pieces for the Candyman soundtrack. It became a New York anthem, got remixed by Nicki Minaj, landed in the upper reaches of the Billboard Hot 100, and has since gone double platinum.

It can be hard to get a word in edgewise, Kirk kind just free associates from one subject to another, pontificating – in just the first few minutes that we’ve been hanging. He talks about gentrification in New York (“There were dice games and love stories in those buildings”). He raves about the the crystalline sound design in EDM (“All these different soundscapes to intensify the feeling of excitement at the peak of the night”). He bemoans the disposability of streaming music (“You know when someone hands you a pamphlet on the street and you don’t even look at that shit?”). He may not be sure exactly how he wants to spill everything he wants to say, but he’s doing his best to figure it out.

That “energy” he refers to means a lot of different things. It’s being in the club and seeing someone “throwing up their guts” to a song he made. It’s a famous comedian – whose name he forgets – reaching out with a video to show how much their toddler loves the song. It’s the chance that you could be anywhere, doing anything, and hear one of your songs playing. People love Pro Era, and they love Kirk’s solo efforts as a rapper, singer, and songwriter too, but this was on a whole other scale. When thinking about making IIWII, there was this new consideration: “ Damn, I need ten more of them motherfuckers.” The question was how, exactly? The answer, on some level, was to look back to his roots.

On one hand the rest is history – people still talk about Kirk’s place in Pro Era, and more broadly in those terms, as an inveterate experimenter both as a rapper and a producer. That’s true, but Kirk tells me it’s not the whole story. Before he got invested in scratchy, twisted experimental rap stuff, his tastes were different. He favoured colourful pop music of all stripes, naming Calvin Harris, Animal Collective, Kid Cudi, and the bleeding heart emo pop band Hawthorne Heights as early influences. Lest I doubt his sincere fandom, he pauses to loudly and nasally sing the epic chorus of their, uh, kinda annoying 2006 single “Saying Sorry” at a volume that was probably loud enough for the construction workers to hear a floor away. While he appreciated the nimble syllable twisting and complicated wordplay of the rap stuff he was into, he appreciated how this other music could afford to be direct. There was no mistaking the feelings that inspired the music – everything was on the table.

Then all of a sudden that became his life. He made the decision not to go to college in order to focus on his craft. So far it’s paid off. “I never had a job in my life,” he says with an incredulous laugh. “I never made a resume. I don’t know how to do that shit.”

Kirk – born Kirlan Labarrie – grew up Brooklyn, a fact that he holds close to his identity. He told Interview Magazine in 2015 that the borough’s “hustle” was instilled from him in a young age. He met Joey Bada$$ in high school, and ended up tight with Pro Era through him. After just hanging out in the studio shooting the shit with that crew, he decided he wanted to rap too at 16. He’d been nursing a healthy interest in underground greats, like DOOM, Peanut Butter Wolf, Madlib, and Mos Def, and attempted to channel their slippery lyricism into his work with the rising group.

In 2015, Kirk released the solo project Late Knight Special, a nocturnal collection of street-level songs that hewed far more to the sounds he explored with his Pro Era compatriots than to his childhood favourites. There’s guest spots from some of his most talented friends, like Joey, Noname, Mick Jenkins, and Thundercat. It’s conceptually solid listen, driven by this feeling that Kirk’s called by the caliber of his guests to try to live up to their technical abilities as rappers. By my estimation, that competitive spirit worked out pretty well, but he says in retrospect, he wasn’t sure what he was trying to say. “That was a time in my life where I couldn’t articulate myself as well,” he says. “I wasn’t as barred up as Joey or [Pro Era founder Capital] Steez. But I knew I wanted to express shit.“

The success of “Plain Jane” brought into focus just how he might do that. Seeing the effect that it had on people, as a pop song, reminded him of the effect that the music he loved as a kid did. “You can have bars and not make a good song,” he says. “Growing up, I didn’t listen to Cudi for double entendres. I listened to Cudi to not feel alone.” He realised that’s what he needed to do too, to speak clearly, rather than focus on proving himself as a technician.