Loe Shimmy Calls Himself a “Delusional” Artist. So Far, It’s Working.

If Loe Shimmy felt like a kid again spiritually, he felt pretty shitty physically.

Last month, roaming a carnival grounds in a bulky-ass robot suit alongside Drake—who was also in a bulky-ass robot suit—Shimmy suffered through seven hours of agony filming the video for “I’m Spent,” the biggest song of his career so far.

“That was the most painful video I ever shot. But it was worth it,” he tells Complex. “It hurts to pop it sometimes.”

But most of the time, it looks—and sounds—conspicuously effortless.

Since his 2020 debut, Zombie Land, Shimmy has specialized in a mix of gritty, codeine-laced drug raps and easy-sleazy theme songs for fly-guy shit-talk, fraught love, and 4 a.m. sneaky links, his delirious, nasally melodies spilling out like a pitched-up Future with a bad case of congestion.

He’s been dropping for a while now, but he’s in the middle of a level-up. Last year, he was named to XXL’s Freshman Class, opened for Lil Baby on the WHAM Tour, and scored a minor hit with the Don Toliver-assisted “3am.”

After his aforementioned Drake guest spot, “I’m Spent,” which was on HABIBTI, peaked at No. 34 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, he’s just finished off a sold-out tour. At the end of September, he brought Future out to perform “March Madness” during a Miami concert. A few weeks ago, he sold out his show at The Novo in Los Angeles. Now, he’s already looking to perform down the street. “I got a video of the Crypto[.com Arena] on my phone saying, ‘I’m finna sell you out,’” he says. “[I’m] just pushin’ it.”

Right now he’s just kicking it. In LA, specifically, as he taps in for our Friday afternoon Zoom call.

At 27, he’s one of the best rappers in his 20s, but some things haven’t changed. We’ve met before; two years ago for an interview in Manhattan. During that conversation, he paused to take a call from his jeweler—then introduced me to the chainsman over FaceTime.

Today, he flips on his camera just long enough to show off a pair of rainbow Air Force 1s. “These Forces I got on my feet are one out of 100 in the world made right now,” he tells me. Then he zeroes in on his diamond-studded chain. “I’m getting my point across,” he says, motioning to a cross with more pointers than Luka Dončić in double overtime.

Because Shimmy records on such a rolling basis, he doesn’t recall the exact date he began making his latest LP, Pretty Girlz Run the World, which dropped in July. He settles by saying it was about a year ago.

For the project, Shimmy engages in an exhibition of jagged romance and extreme tricking. His songs double as soundtracks for brunch at Kokomo or a late-night Uber to that ex you shouldn’t have texted. The Brent Faiyaz-assisted “Run The World” is the audible version of a fuckboy’s playbook. With its ethereal cowbells, Shimmy’s disembodied vocals, and a fluttering bassline that seems to dissolve before rematerializing in three- or four-second increments, “Too Exotic” is a cosmic safari for baddies.

Shimmy’s favorite song, “Top Notch,” sounds like an expensive trip through an Avatar’s jewelry store. Depending on your gender, the beginning of the hook is either the most inspiring or most annoying little catchphrase you’ve ever heard. But, shameless pandering or not, it’s phonetically infectious: “This lil' bitch a five-star, hot shot, top notch.”

As the album’s title implies, this is an album for the ladies—a potion concocted for startenders, influencers, or any other chick that regularly gets over 100 likes on her IG carousel. “It’s a thousand captions on the album for them,” he shares. “I make them feel trim.”

Four years after Drizzy reposted Shimmy’s song “Tina” on Instagram, they connected in the studio. Around the time Shimmy embarked on tour with Sexyy Red, Drake told him to send some music. Shimmy sent four songs, with one of them turning out to be “I’m Spent.” “He texted me and said, ‘We got a hit,’” Shimmy remembers. And he was right. To date, the track’s collected over 49 million streams on Spotify. The song is a standout on Habibti, the R&B-leaning installment of the three albums Drake released this past spring. Shimmy was already well-versed in studio trickery, but the 6ix God taught him a thing or two about arrangement. “If you heard the original song, you’d be like, ‘What the hell? It’s that different?’” Shimmy says. “He’s a scientist with this shit. He just went over there and just did his science.”

Shimmy is doing his own experimenting, too. With music. Possibility. Slang. He’s earned 2 billion streams globally throughout his career, but now he wants three. He hasn’t even quite crossed into arena tours yet, but he’s already looking into “palladiums”—which are “two stadiums put in one.” This Halloween he’s hosting his own concert, Zombieland, with BigXthaPlug, Sexyy Red, Rob49, and Brent Faiyaz.

The goals are lofty, but comparatively less fantastical than a high school dropout kicking it with the world’s biggest pop star in an expensive ass robosuit. In those terms, reality can feel more like negligible fine print than bold terms and conditions. His music—dreamy and adrift—plays out like a conduit for his past, present, and destiny. “I’m either reminiscing, manifesting, or just letting out what I’m going through at the moment,” he says in his most existential moment of the afternoon. “If I want to sell out a stadium, I’m gonna say it in my music, and then I’m gonna do it.”

If somehow you didn’t know, Shimmy embraces the whole limitless ambition thing. “I’m just finna sit here and just be a delusional artist,” he tells me.

Being a delusional artist is cool, but it doesn’t really matter if you’re not a good artist. An evolving artist. Luckily, Shimmy’s been handling the latter part.

Simo Fre, who’s worked with Shimmy since early 2023, recalls Shimmy operating within the confines of more conventional Pompano Beach aesthetics when they began their working relationship. These days, they’re incorporating more distorted sounds that make his music simultaneously stranger and more commercial.

“All the drums have this distortion on it that makes it super punchy,” Fre tells me. “There’s a lot of distortion in the drums and the melody is really synthy. So that’s what probably gets the audience like, ‘What am I listening to?’”

His voice was an earlier riddle. “At first, it wasn't understood, but then they understood it later,” Shimmy says of his vocals. He laughs at popular social media jokes comparing his sound to a mosquito’s. It can be entrancing, and its sinuousness cuts through industry-wide sonic monotony.

“He’s able to catch certain notes and do the high-pitched voice, and a lot of artists don’t know how to do that,” Fre says. He also expects Shimmy to get back to his Zombieland sound in the future. But Shimmy himself is looking for new territories to explore. Sonically and physically.

It’s unclear whether he has a career roadmap, but he does have a mood board of sorts. A life mood board: in his Instagram bookmarks, he keeps links to plain-jane watches he wants to buy, foods he wants to eat, and places he wants to visit. He says that, after November, he wants to travel to other countries and record. “[I want to] just absorb new life. New energy, new inspiration. And just come back stronger,” he explains.

“I need [to record with] Tems. I wanna go to Africa and go Afro,” Shimmy adds. “But I’m gonna go everywhere.” He lists off spots like Bali and Greece. He mentions wanting to stay in an overwater bungalow popular in the Maldives. “Gotta go there and need like three of those,” he tells me. “Some baddies in the other one, the gang in the other one.”

He’s appreciative of his success, but he doesn’t sound in awe of it. “I already knew it was coming,” he says. “I’m still starving. I still got the same hunger.”

“I ain’t got no roof over my head. I ain’t putting no boundaries on top of me,” he explains. “We’re going to the moon.”