prettifun barely enjoyed blowing up. His August and October 2024 mixtapes Pretti and FunHouse pushed his heartfelt rage raps and chipper, upbeat sound in front of an unprecedentedly wider audience, but the attention was debilitating. “People was looking at me all types of different ways, talking about me all types of different ways,” he tells The FADER. “I wasn’t talking to nobody, I wasn’t answering no calls. I couldn’t make no beats, I couldn’t even record.”⁠ ⁠ At least some of the burnout can be chalked up to his breakneck recording pace: the self-produced Pretti came together in just a week and a half. Capitalizing on his fast-rising profile, FunHouse enlisted several of the scene’s preeminent producers to burrow deeper into the young rapper’s euphoric, freewheeling sound. Riding high, prettifun teased that a third project was set to drop before the end of 2024. Then he went radio silent.⁠ ⁠ “It was a lot of stuff going on in my personal life. And how I made it past it was really j...