Throughout his career, Nettspend has been the laughable little brother of the underground rap genre. Despite his young age, he has already achieved unimaginable success; in just two years, he went from dancing to “drankdrankdrank” in his bathroom and getting his DMs leaked to walking for MiuMiu and Gucci, posing for pictures with Paris Hilton and Alex Consani, and playing sold out shows all over the world. Listening to Nettspend used to be ironic. Why would anybody really enjoy listening to a white teenager rapping about being in the club alone? On early life crisis (2026), however, Nettspend combines this irony with a more mature expression of his artistry to create a keystone album in the underground-rage-rap genre.
Gunner Shepardson, a.k.a. Nettspend, hails from the suburbs of Richmond, VA, and he only recently turned 19 years old on March 18. That makes him younger than most Georgetown students. He started making music on Soundcloud at fifteen until he went viral with breakout single “drankdrankdrank” (2023). His initial popularity was due to his absolute devotion to his image. He had shaggy blonde hair, sagged his Dior jeans, and rapped about sipping lean with his friends instead of going to class. It was absurd but 100% sincere. Shepardson wasn’t trying to be satirical or comedic—he was just being Nettspend.
Nettspend’s debut album, BAD ASS F*CKING KID (2024), is an incohesive jumble of singles. Each song is magnificent on its own, but there’s absolutely nothing holding the album together. It feels like a mindless mixtape a record label pumps out after an artist falls out of popularity or passes away, not the debut album of an up-and-coming rapper. After such a rocky first album, however, Nettspend’s success continued with his forays into fashion—modeling for Miu Miu, Gucci, 424, and ERL—where he began to really hone in on his image. He grew out and split-dyed his hair, started experimenting with his style, and even got a red tattoo of the word “BAD” on his ribcage.
But this focus on becoming the “badass fucking kid” quickly became concerning. People saw him as a cornball and a poser, and he still hadn’t seen an increase in listeners or streams. Prior to this album, fans wondered how Nettspend was going to be able to grow out of this box he put himself in. Would Nettspend’s sound mature, or would his reputation be stuck in the past as a child star? After around 250 streams this month, I can confidently say that Nettspend has broken into a whole new realm with early life crisis.
The first lyric asks, “Are you ready?” Honestly, I wasn’t. I adored Nettspend’s old sound on songs like “Shut Up,” “Say Please,” and “nothing like uuu,” but I was scared his new project was just going to be repetitive and lack innovation. The insane amount of promotion and the postponed release date seemed to be trying to cover up a below average project.
However, my mind was changed when I heard “pain talk” featuring OsamaSon. The song immediately starts with a grating synth line that lightly sits over a grainy, distorted bass drum that pounds relentlessly throughout the track. Nettspend’s voice is mechanically pitched and doused in autotune as he aggressively chirps over the beat. While his rhymes are subpar and his bars don’t tell much of a story, there’s something appealing about the overstimulation of it all; you can vividly envision his lips popping as he screams, “pain, pain, pain, pain, this the pain talk.”
OsamaSon’s inclusion on this song is notable, as he is a well-renowned underground rapper and a frequent Nettspend collaborator. He has been pumping out class albums (i.e., Flex Musix, psykotic, and Jump Out), since 2023, and he has developed an iconic sound. His verse on “pain talk” contrasts Nettspend’s raspy aggression with his iconic melodic mumbles. The fact that Nettspend included OsamaSon on his album has been a long time coming. They made “Wake Up” and “withdrawals” together, both being instant hits in the genre, and they are some of the best collaborators in the community. Everytime Osama and Nettspend hop on a track together, it’s just unbelievable, and “pain talk” is no exception.
While “pain talk” is one of the best songs on the album, OsamaSon’s feature sadly gets upstaged on “masked up”, where—miraculously—Nettspend got Youngboy Never Broke Again (NBA Youngboy) to collaborate on both a song and a music video. NBA Youngboy is one of the most popular rappers out right now, currently standing at 20 million monthly listeners on Spotify and having made dozens of albums since the start of his massive popularity in 2017 with AI Youngboy. This kind of feature is unheard of in the underground; huge, mainstream rappers don’t usually feature on small artist’s songs, so Nettspend has effectively made history with a feature of this caliber.
Not only is NBA Youngboy’s feature itself beyond belief, the song “masked up” is quite good, too. The beat is wildly warped and distorted to the point where the synth melody doesn’t even register as music. The only thing carrying the chord progression of the song is the 808s, as Nettspend’s autotuned voice is simply everywhere, yipping and crying in short blasts of fury. When NBA Youngboy comes in, it’s kind of cathartic. He uses less autotune, rolls his “t” in the word “out,” and raps with a quick precision that evidences his honed craft. His rapping ability outpaces Nettspend’s, but their skill difference doesn’t detract from the song’s overall sound. Rather, NBA Youngboy cosigns Nettspend on this song, providing his expertise on the song of a less experienced artist in order to boost his reputation.
While early life crisis has a small but mighty list of features, I was afraid his solo-songs would be reminiscent of his sensational older songs or mediocre without the support of legendary rappers. I found the opposite to be true, and this album quickly became one of my go-to rage albums to throw on, something I never expected to declare about Nettspend. “trap house 2016” serves us a quick snare groove matched with a crazy tornado of acidic 808s, while the bars speak of our collective mom knowing him as “Nettspend”—a fitting claim, as it is his name. On “cross em out,” Nettspend debuts a deeper voice and creates a dark, demonic sound. The beat is equally devilish, with hi-hat blasts and snare rolls drowning beneath the continuous buzz of 808s. This track exemplifies the newest generation of rage-rap to a T. In contrast, songs like “lil bieber” and “paris hilton” hold back a little bit on the beats, focusing much more on fabricating intricate melody soundscapes rather than mind-numbing rage vortexes.
Although I adore it, Nettspend’s album is admittedly derivative in many places. His voice sounds like Che, his beats sound like Playboi Carti or Ken Carson, and his verses sound like OsamaSon. This can be partially attributed to the fact that Rok, wegonebeok, cXo, and skai are some of the most prolific producers in the underground rap scene right now, and they’re all over this album. Nettspend isn’t trying to reinvent rage rap; he’s just trying to fit into the genre he’s become a staple of, and this album shouldn’t be knocked just because of its similarity to other projects.
early life crisis is a phenomenal rage-rap album and is proof of Nettspend’s astonishing development of his sound. He has effectively established himself as a rapper people can take seriously, growing from “bad ass f*cking kid” into a “bad ass f*cking adolescent.” What we should all be excited for is when he becomes a “bad ass f*cking adult” and surprises us all with his next project, which, judging on the success of early life crisis, is sure to be a masterpiece.
