How Niontay, Dylvinci, and Laron made Soulja Hate Repellant

A perfect day for Niontay might go something like this. Wake up. Go to Granny’s crib. Get some food. Hit the road and grab a fresh white Gman t-shirt from the store. And then probably skate, catch a good day. “Like this bro,” Niontay says as he tilts his phone to show me the balmy blue sky outside the crib. “Perfect day to skate. 75 degrees, sun out, not cloudy at all.”

If you can’t make your way down to Kissimmee, Florida, where he’s from, you can vicariously experience Niontay’s idyllic day through his December 2025 mixtape, Soulja Hate Repellant. Growing up across the U.S., Niontay has always metabolized various fragments of regional sounds in his music — a little New York hip-hop here, a little Florida fast music there — but his syncretic approach sounds smoother than ever on his latest. Soulja Hate Repellant is a demented dash through swampy depths, cohered by an extra-tight production circle and a mixtape ethos.

His “more artistically inclined” April 2025 debut album, Fada3of$ (that’s “for the love of money”), was a culmination of his career thus far: Niontay says the recording process was like collecting Infinity Stones. You might consider Soulja Hate Repellant, then, to be its opposite. Created without pressure or expectation, it’s the soundtrack of Niontay at the height of his powers, making music that feels good for its own sake.

“With Soulja Hate Repellant, I was on some Wayne, No Ceilings shit,” he says. “I was just trying to rap and have some money.”

The naturalistic approach yields some of Niontay’s most saturated and evocative songs yet. When I ask what’s changed for him as a rapper over the years, he cites a growth in confidence from “people actually rocking with my music,” as well as a jump in musical quality from working with other producers.

It’s different, he says, from when he’s producing on his own, hunting down “the most rare sample from a YouTube channel with two subscribers,” then trying to “flip that shit hard,” and write an even harder verse. “When I could just write and just rap, it’s much easier, you feel me?”

For Soulja Hate Repellant, one of those key producers was Dylvinci, whose name Niontay chants three times in a row at the start of the mixtape as if summoning Beetlejuice. The pair have collaborated sparingly in the past, but on SHR, the Grammy Award-winning North Carolina producer contributes vivid backdrops for five of the 12 tracks, infusing his jazzy, psychedelic signature into Niontay’s higher-BPM rhythms.

Dylvinci says over the phone that he’d been sending Niontay beats for “two years straight” before things finally clicked last March. They initially connected in 2023, when Dylvinci was working with skater-turned-rapper Na-Kel Smith and spent a couple weeks “going to his crib every day” to record. One day, he pulled up and Niontay was there. “He was super nice and super chill,” Dylvinci remembers. But the biggest impression Niontay left on him was his rapping.

“He’s having these crazy bars and the tone of his voice is fire. I got his number and started looking him up; this is right when he dropped his first album, Dontay’s Inferno. He literally dropped it that week and a month goes by and he becomes one of my favorite rappers.”

Last March, in between sessions with Isaiah Rashad and attempts to “work with Doechii” at TDE studios, Dylvinci made his first beats for Soulja Hate Repellant. Niontay texted him back immediately, and recorded “Rockoutcentury” and “100days100nights,” the first two songs on the album, the same night. The next month, Dylvinci flew out to the East Coast to work on the album.

By that time, Niontay had already been recording in New York City for a couple months, working with Harrison of Surf Gang, Tony Seltzer, and most critically, Laron, whose heavy involvement with the album is immortalized in the tracklist with “Larizzy’s Laire.” Its title refers to the N.Y.C. producer’s go-to studio, where Niontay recorded three songs on the record and a few more that didn’t quite make the cut.

One of those as-yet-unreleased songs came from a February 2025 session that spawned the standout MAVI collaboration “Jammer’s Anonymous.” The duo started off writing to the Laron and Subjxct 5 beat, “but then it was like, ‘Let’s just go off top and have fun in the studio.’ We freestyled to that shit for like an hour before we even rapped, and the freestyle we did could have been the whole song. We were really rapping for real,” Niontay says.

“That’s one of the things from this project too, bro, it’s a lot of fun sessions for real,” he adds. “This is the first project that I damn near recorded every song in the studio. I usually record myself at home, but these songs came from being in sessions with the homies, you feel me?”

“Shoutout to Tay man, he already had that title worked out,” Laron says of “Larizzy’s Laire” over the phone. “Now that’s like a namesake track for me.” He first heard Niontay’s music around 2019 or 2020, when MIKE and 10K did a pop-up show at Good Company, though it would be a few years before they got to know each other. In 2023, Jadasea and Laron kept running into Niontay as they opened up on Wiki’s Europe tour; eventually, a quorum of 10K affiliates ended up in Paris together at a party sponsored by Hennessy.

“So we all had bottles, we were all fucked up, and we ended up getting into a whole little squabble at the end of the night,” Laron laughs. “Just a real bonding experience.”

Laron and Niontay’s collaborations prior to Soulja Hate Repellent were shaped by “dreamy” samples and careful attention to atmosphere. On SHR, Laron brings a similar emphasis on texture to “April 7th (Westside swanging)” and “Dreamin’ (of u;),” telling me he’s especially proud of the latter track.

“It had this emotional element that felt different compared to everything [else he did], and that was exciting,” he says. “What it is to be a producer, it’s finding those artists that are willing to take those chances, or you’re giving them that belief to take that shot.”

That song’s starry-eyed ambience segues out of a surprisingly straightforward sample chop on “Mark William Lewis flow.” Laron says that song in particular “came together real swift” when the pair locked in: “Once we got it down, we just kept it how it was.”

Laron chalks it up to Niontay’s “natural” approach, but it’s clear that the MC, who says he used to “overthink” his music, isn’t moving on instinct alone. “When I link with Niontay, he has the aura of a real artist,” Dylvinci says. “The way he works — he takes his time, he writes for 30, 40 minutes and then he starts punching it in.”

Both producers mention Niontay’s versatility as a major draw, saying he’ll hop on any beat, no matter how unexpected. “He’s very open,” Laron says. “So I can just throw ideas out there and see.” And Dylvinci adds that he was especially hyped when Niontay chose the “weird, lofi” instrumental for “Free Luigi,” saying he’d been hoping someone would rap over the track but didn’t know who would.

“That beat makes me happy as hell,” Niontay says of “Free Luigi.” In fact, the 8-bit nightcore tune is his favorite instrumental on the album. “I still listen to that beat. Not even the song, I go into my notes and just listen to the beat. As soon as Dylvinci played that shit, I think we had already made 3 songs that day, but I was like, ‘Nah we gotta do this shit before I go home.’”

Still, that wasn’t the longest studio trip behind Soulja Hate Repellant. Niontay tells me the “craziest session” was for the first half of “Cressidaway!/TPGeeK” with Earl Sweatshirt. After a week of recording at Tony Seltzer’s studio, exhaustion caught up with Niontay, who passed out on the floor.

“All I remember is MIKE had on these patent leather shoes and the light was coming off the shoes,” Niontay laughs. “I woke up, I’m blinking, I’m seeing this n***a’s shoes and the light shining off them into my eye.

“Then Harrison walks out like, ‘Oh my god, now I feel crazy I don’t know what’s wrong with me.’ Walks out the studio and faints,” he continues. “I’m still recovering so I’m just on the couch hearing everything. Tony and Thebe looking at each other like, ‘what the fuck is going on?’ MIKE giving Harrison water, Harrison pouring the water on himself, just fully clothed like, ‘I can’t feel my face.’

“That’s the craziest session, not even just for that album, bro, in general. I had the homies hit me up the next day like, ‘Yo, you good, bro?’” Niontay says. “I’m like, ‘Yeah, I’m straight, bro.’ That was an amazing session.”