If only everyone could make breaking up as seem as seamless and musical as rapper Goldlink.

With his recently-released debut album And After That We Didn’t Talk, the 22-year-old DMV rapper continues to ride the waves that have been arriving on the music world’s shores since he first debuted his “future bounce” genre to the masses in 2014. But this time around, it’s not only his own genre that’s jumping in to get the waves flowing. When listening to Goldlink, also known as D’Anthony Carlos, his whiplash flow and out-of-left-field rhymes make it clear that he’s obviously a natural. But it wasn’t always this way. Growing up in D.C. listening to the native go-go music while surviving life in the streets, creating his own music was originally the last thing on his mind. In fact, it wasn’t until recently that Goldlink discovered his true talent behind the mic. “I just started doing music because I had nothing else to do and all the homies wanted to doit,” the rapper says, nonchalantly. “I ended up picking up on it and people were like, ‘You're actually kind of good.’”

This statement of approval from family, neighbors, and contemporaries alike is quickly becoming an understatement. Since premiering his first mixtape, The God Complex, in the summer of 2014, Goldlink has climbed from his celebrated Soundcloud profile to the high ranks of the music blogosphere and festival circuits, perplexing and enticing listeners with his devil-may-care flow and genre-bending beats. On the raucous, critically-acclaimed The God Complex, Goldlink managed to give Slick Rick a run for his nighttime storytelling money with the mixtape’s party banger, “Bedtime Story,” where he made listeners realize that he doesn’t need to take a single breath to provide a sucker punch to the musical guts. Washington D.C.’s go-go musical influence is evident on tracks such as this, but it didn’t take long until Goldlink expanded his production horizons. During this early music stage, the rapper quickly developed a union with up-and-coming producers like while cementing himself as the hip-hop element of the influential music crew. “It’s like I was the missing piece to their puzzle in a way,” Goldlink states when speaking of their music connection. But even through all of this, faithful listeners (and those who were trolled by his music video “appearances”) were still left wondering: Who is Goldlink, exactly?

This question is also clearly one the musician has been asking himself since his spitting skills and taste for the unexpected on The God Complex first put him on the map. Goldlink quickly learned that the path to success is never an easy one, but it should always be an insightful one. “[That journey] taught me that the world is bigger than D.C., and I honestly didn’t know that,” he says.

Goldlink’s honest preference for privacy and his recent life- changing adjustments are what makes And After That We Didn’t Talk such a refreshing surprise debut. For a musician so private and nonchalant to truly reveal himself to the world with an album this naked and emotionally raw comes as a shock. But let’s make one thing clear: this album isn’t meant to be your own personal breakup remedy. “This is what happened to me; I broke up with my girl and this is the road that I took,” he says. “I didn’t make [the album] to tell people ‘This is what happened, this is where it went wrong, but maybe if I had done this correctly I would have had a successful relationship.’”

While Goldlink does let his (semi) soft side show on tracks such as “Polarized” and “Zipporah,” the party vibes still make scene-stealing appearances with tracks like “Dark Skin Women” and “Unique.” You can cry to his music, or you can get down to it—just don’t try to turn the rapper into your personal relationship guru.

“Maybe the listener can learn from [And After That We Didn’t Talk], but the intention wasn’t to teach someone how to be in a successful relationship,” says Goldlink. “I guess you can learn from my mistakes, but I don’t really care what people take away from it. I wrote the album in letter form to a girl. She loved it.”

While the album does take on serious subject matter, it’s still boasts the future bounce aesthetic, of which Goldlink has become the face of. Consisting of bass-heavy grooves that include a mix of funk and good ‘ol classic hip-hop vibes, the genre is ever-evolving—with Goldlink at the helm. “It doesn’t matter what people classify me as, because sometimes classification is easier for people to understand,” he says. “I don’t see genres, I just see creativity. An artist is an artist.”

And this artistry for forging ahead with future bounce has made itself apparent in other hemispheres of the music world. Recently, top 40 musicians (ahem, Justin Beiber) have taken on the genre with bouncier new singles while other like-minded mainstreams are also prone to take note on what's going on in the DMV underground. Just don’t assume that Goldlink is mad about it.

“Future bounce has started to become more accessible and others are taking from the culture that we’re building, but not in a bad way,” he says. “The sound is starting to expand and I can tell that the culture is shifting towards the way that [we’ve] been creating music for the last two or three years. I feel like we’re just training the correct people’s ears.”

As long as the power of movement remains in the right hands—a.k.a. Goldlink’s— the future looks well, bouncy.