Leroy Is Ready to Be Himself

The rain had just subsided the evening I met up with leroy—the artist formerly known as WELL$, born Leroy Shingu—to ride around, listen to some of his new music, and visit his old neighborhood on the west side of Charlotte. He’s wearing some of his new merch: a shirt with a woman’s hand wrapped around the back of his blonde fade. When we meet up, however, his hair is black and tucked under a black baseball cap with a gold “C” for Charlotte. The cap, he says, is a collaboration between another local rapper Reuben Vincent, his DJ, Jonny Kaine, and the popular Whitaker Group-owned clothing store Social Status in Plaza Midwood. He’s calm. Cool, yet warm. 

The city is changing rapidly, and I worry what of his old stomping grounds will still be standing, but I look forward to seeing the city through his eyes. Now 28 years old and newly resettled after a two-and-a-half-year stint in Virginia, he’s returned to the city that raised him—the inspiration for much of the music that once made him one of the state’s hottest up-and-coming acts, before he stepped away due to feelings of self-doubt and concerns about the longevity of his music career. 

As just a teenager in 2014, the Congolese-American burst onto the scene with MTSYD: the Revenge of the African Booty Scratcher, lauded at the time by Pitchfork for its “firm, clear voice,” and for lyrics that touched "upon something volatile, contentious, and his own." Two years later, he followed up with The Way I’m Living Makes My Mom Nervous, featuring acts like the Grammy-nominated electronic pop duo Sylvan Esso and an already-exploding Metro Boomin. In his early music, which propelled him into major North Carolina festivals like Hopscotch or Moogfest, his sound was “snarling and adrenaline-pumping,” as Super Empty founder Ryan Cocca wrote in 2016. But as his star was rising, so were his insecurities about music and his purpose.

As we drive down Sunset on the backroads, the northwest parts of the city that have yet to feel the full sting of gentrification fly past us. Back here, it’s still quiet and peaceful, and the green of the country spills onto the roads. You can almost feel the clock moving backwards. By the time we reach Pawtucket, the memories come flooding back. 

As a kid, leroy, his cousins, and his friends spent hours outside playing basketball in the neighbor’s backyard or running up and down the streets. Inside the house was more somber. When he was 11, his mother spent six months in an immigration detention center (first in Charlotte, then in Alabama, he says). Anxiety, misplaced creativity, and a desire to prove himself fed into theft, dropping out of school, gang affiliation, and eventually, fights with his father and run-ins with the police. 

Looking for any way to make money, he and his friends would steal everything from phones to cars. As we drive around his neighborhood, he points to a large gray and black house with a tiny cemetery just steps away. That house, he said, was one of the first places he understood what it meant to hustle and make a buck. Sometimes, they would go down to the Dollar General and buy peanut brittles to resell around the neighborhood. Once, they showed up to the house with the cemetery and told the owners they were raising money for their AAU team. They left with $200. “I've seen my dad get money a whole bunch of different ways, so it kind of just kind of stuck on me,” he says. After failing out of Phillip O. Berry Academy of Technology, many of the schemes became about more than just the money—they were also about proving himself as someone who wasn’t afraid to go there. 

That entrepreneurial spirit still hasn’t left him, though he’s now leaning into more conventional businesses. He’s returning to music with a new and more laid-back sound, but he’s also starting a new job in SaaS sales with more flexible hours than his previous gig, so he can devote more time to his creative projects. A new line of “leroy” merch, and a series of sitcom-like mini-sodes released via Instagram called The Leroy Show, serve as both a campaign for his return to music and an opportunity to flex his creative muscles. In the captions, he offers pithy, open-ended missives like, “I miss a good roll out,” and “is anybody having fun anymore?”

When we pull up to his old house, his neighbor TC, who still lives next door, is standing outside on the phone. TC, he says, saw the cops coming and going from leroy’s house, heard his fights with his parents, and offered him the kind of advice a kid can sometimes only really hear from someone a few degrees removed from their reality. His parents lost that house in 2018 and part of his motivation for pursuing music was to get the house back. 

He’s fallen short of that goal, he says, but he’s been successful enough to buy a new place that he and his parents now call home. Family is important to him—he has the word tattooed across his knuckles—and it’s apparent in his music, from early release The Way I’m Living, under the name WELL$, to his recent single “TTG,” which he released on June 7th as leroy. The cover art is a photo of leroy and his cousins as kids. His father kneels behind the smiling boys, and leroy stands in front, dressed in all white with his hand in the air. 

A few weeks later, we meet up again in Uptown at photographer Kevin “Surf” Mitchell’s studio at the VAPA Center. It’s mid-morning on a Sunday, hot as hell and humid. The former Hal Marshall building used to be a Sears until it became a government building in the 80s. After sitting empty for years, eleven arts organizations turned it into a local hub for creatives and dubbed it the Visual and Performing Arts Center in September 2021. Photos from Surf’s “Couch Surfing” exhibit adorn the outside of the building.

After some headshots, some “Picasso shit” (Surf’s words), and a brief conversation about Teezo Touchdown’s potential career trajectory, we’re back on the road. The three of us, plus Ryan, hop in leroy’s Jaguar and drive back to his old neighborhood. As he weaves in and out of the lanes, garnering a few jabs and raised eyebrows from the rest of us, Charlotte rapper Cozzy calls Surf on FaceTime, and a hype leroy reaches back for the phone. The two settle into an excited and familiar rapport as they get to talking about Dreamville rapper Lute’s event later that day in Bessemer City (roughly 30 minutes west), and about getting together and making music. From the back of the car, Surf—a Charlotte native and Northwest School of the Arts graduate—shakes his head and shouts towards the driver’s seat, and the rapper on the other end of his phone: “You called me, remember?"

We pull up to the laundromat next to where Chris Davies—a friend of leroy’s father, and another man who pushed him to take the possibility of entrepreneurship seriously—used to own a store. While posing for pictures inside the faded, yellowing laundromat that he would spend time around as a kid, leroy points to the markers of his childhood, including the same Dollar General from which he and his friends used to steal goods to resell. We return to his old home and run into TC again, who starts talking about his kids and asks leroy if he’s planning to have any. The still-youthful, late-twenties rapper demurs, saying that for now, he’s focused on returning to his art. 

In doing so, he’s also returning to some basics, a trend evident in his new branding, visuals, and most importantly, his name. While he was able to launch a successful career under the name WELL$, he’s stripping away the personas and the aliases and embracing the version of himself that’s present today: leroy.

You can hear the makings of leroy in some of the last releases before he hit pause. In “Where Dreams Go To Die” from 2020's Forza 6, he takes a few steps back from the deep gravelly voice that personified his earlier records and rides the bouncy, synth-heavy beat all the way to the hook, where he shouts, “Hold tight, dog I haven’t let you down yet, I’ve got a purpose I ain’t found yet/I’m a king, I just haven’t been crowned yet, I wanna sing, but I haven’t found my voice yet.” In 2021, following a pregnancy announcement from the rapper’s cousin and Immaculate Taste label cofounder Mike Tambashe, he and rapper/producer Angelo Mota came together for ZAÏRE—a knowing, 10-track album showcasing the duo’s emotional and sonic depth. The album, including its name, was dedicated to Tambashe’s son. “It was a guide to life for [Zaïre] to hear our stories, hear what we went through,” leroy told CLTure at the time. “We’re telling [him] where we fucked up.”

When I ask who leroy is today, he describes himself as more laid-back and introspective. “I'm not trying to yell too much. I did all of that when I was younger,” he says. He’s grown from his earlier battles with self-doubt, the loss of loved ones, and the realities of the music business that, for a time, pushed him away from music almost entirely. He’s more confident and clear on the role music is meant to play in his life. In the unreleased music he played for me across multiple days in Charlotte, that confidence is apparent—the production is more soulful, and the beats are slow and soaring, allowing his lyricism to speak for itself. 

He doesn’t have it all figured out, but he’s got a lot to say. Throughout the day of the shoot, the four of us talk about everything from the current state of hip-hop and anti-government factions like the Sovereign Citizen movement to the war in Palestine and the exploitation of the Congo. Over pizzas from Sapienza, he shares his take on the Kendrick-Drake beef, the intersections of art and commerce, and the role of the moral leader vs. the pop star. While leroy’s return reveals an artist more at ease with himself, his passion and energy about everything is perceptible, especially the music.

“My level of honesty and my approach is new,” he says. He’s not hyper-focused on making hits and he’s not trying to cram in as many clever bars as possible. “I'm just taking what comes like, really, just allowing myself room and freedom to express myself and get back to having fun.”

Fola Onifade is a Charlotte-based writer and creative, and the staff writer and associate producer at Democracy in Color. She's also the editorial director for Sistories, an interactive Black feminist literary magazine. When she's not writing or reading, she's either dancing somewhere in NoDa or cruising the aisles at Sleepy Poet Antique Mall. You can keep up with her at folaonifade.com.

Kevin "Surf" Mitchell is a Charlotte born-and-raised photographer whose work has appeared in outlets like BET, MTV, and Apple Music, and an instructor at The Light Factory Photo Arts Center in Charlotte. You can follow him on Instagram at @surfmitchell.