It girl JT – Rap’s new apex of style and sound – is scaling up again. From producing and directing, to performing, with a vision entirely her own, all roads lead to success ahead of her 2026 debut solo album.
The night before our interview had bled into morning. My eyeshadow was gone, and my voice went with it after a friend’s unhinged karaoke performance of “OKAY,” the breakout track from “City Cinderella”, the 2024 solo mixtape that marked JT’s first fully independent statement and signalled that she was entering her own orbit. Running on almost no sleep, I open my laptop. It’s Sunday morning in New York, where JT is, and the 33-year-old rapper appears instantly charismatic and quick-witted. When I explain my failing voice, she insists I send the karaoke footage immediately.
New York fits her, naturally, even if the traffic is treacherous. She has been here for a couple years now, moving through the city with the ease of someone whose visibility has become its own gravitational field. Popstar Addison Rae is in her comments, Climax Bookstore selfies on her feed, and maybe best of all, Naomi Campbell agreed to walk with her.
But before New York, there was Miami. Before magazine covers, before becoming one half of rap duo City Girls, before It girl fashion status, the solo era, the new sound, and the Grammy nomination for her 2024 “Alter Ego [Kaytranda Remix]” with Doechii. Carol City and Liberty City, were the places where JT, born Jatavia Johnson, grew up as one of 18 siblings.
Her childhood was spent largely with her father, whilst her mother spent long stretches in and out of prison. Later, as a teen, she’d flee the nest, navigating and riding her own wave. JT learned early that language could be both armour and compass. Quick wit was survival. Her sharp tongue was currency in a city that rewarded performance and presence. It instilled in her a fierce independence.
“You can be whoever the fuck you want to be. You don’t [need to] stay the same to make people comfortable,” she shares, still staying close to those roots, checking in on friends, and keeping the city that shaped her at the centre of her pride. “I just want to set an example for other girls like me – not just the ones coming up after me.”
Back in 2017, City Girls was first formed under the Quality Control Music label. Pulling from Miami bass, strip-club anthems and their own sharp-edged humour, their earliest songs, “Fuck Dat N****”, “Not Ya Main” and “Where the Bag At”, spread through Miami – and quickly. Naturally, when Drake featured them on “In My Feelings”, the global attention she anticipated would happen eventually arrived faster than expected. Their music became the summer soundtrack. With their second album, Girl Code, “Act Up” became a generational anthem. A few years later, after their third album City On Lock, the viral boom of their song “Twerkulator” dominated TikTok, with over 1.2 million videos made to the sound, including the app’s then-most followed creator, Charli D’Amelio. City Girls lived everywhere: on car stereos, in downtown clubs, in the background of every baddie’s Instagram story.
By 2023, the duo had effectively dissolved, leaving space for JT’s solo ascent – not just as a music artist, but as a woman also. It was a graceful, grateful, “mwah, no bars” situation. “I loved being in the group, don’t get me wrong, but I really do like being a solo artist in my 30s,” she says. It’s allowed her to spread her wings, to grow without parameters, to re-introduce herself to who JT truly is.
With this somewhat serendipitous opportunity, she returned with new focus and quickly turned around “City Cinderella”, a project that not only reintroduced her but outshone even her own previous body of work. Her flows got more intense, her pen more hot-blooded. Reflecting, she says she’s always been quick with words.
As “a little girl” writing music, she always knew she had ‘it’. “If you can go on Facebook or Twitter and have an argument, you could be a rapper,” she says, laughing. “I knew I was good at putting words together when I was young and arguing online. I was like, you ate that JT.” And she’s right; some of the best lyricists are born in the comment sections.
If “City Cinderella” established her as one of the most magnetic new female rappers of her generation, her upcoming debut album, name currently unknown, feels like the arrival of something sharper. This music is built for the club, fast paced, and impossible to sit still through. It began at Jungle City Studios with the New York-based producer Burke Battelle, better known as Chicken, whose beats leaned late night and industrial. JT layered in her Miami bass instincts until the sound became unmistakably hers. “Everything is going to be very upbeat,” she says. “Even if you don’t know the lyrics, when I perform it, you’re going to want to move your body.”
And New York is already responding. To celebrate the album’s first single, “Girls Gone Wild”, she is performing in Brooklyn supported by fashion designer Telfar Clemens, DJ’s Sausha de la Ossa, N.K., Carrie Stacks, Kaitheblackangel, and Chicken, as well as artists ARCA and Cortisa Star.
She is deeply involved in every detail of the album. “I need to start getting my producer credit, because I do a lot of producing in that studio,” JT says. “They don’t be giving me credit from when we put it together.” This era, she explains, is about freedom. “I want to drop music freely without a second thought…I want to try things and be more out there.”
What sets her apart is her 360-degree vision. She has the wit, the visuals, and the sound. “My favourite thing about creating music is being in charge. I’m very hands-on with my music and how I get the final say.” Everything, from production to styling, filters through her. “Post-producing, telling them yes, telling them no, coming up with the concepts. And working with people who have the same passion, we do our thing, and they add their touch.”
Her confidence was sharpened by Lil Uzi Vert, her boyfriend and, as she has said openly, her future husband. “I’m so grateful to have him as a mentor and critic. He does not play with me. He ain’t gonna make me think everything is good.” She laughs. “My boyfriend is such a Leo. He took the training wheels off my bike, that’s what I always say. At first he was helping me and pushing me, and then one day, he just decided, ‘Dress yourself’.” She was furious; he had styled her daily until then. But the shift forced her to define her own fashion instincts. “And then today,” she adds, grinning, “he DM’d me: ‘I love your new direction.’” Spontaneously, like they didn’t know each other.
That shift also made her see the industry differently. “I feel like with female rappers, we always had to be so sexy, so cool, so sexualised,” she says. “Still to this day, they want us to look a certain way, hair a certain way, appeal a certain way. There’s too many of us for us to all be the same. We damn near all come from the same background, trench backgrounds, poverty, and I feel like it keeps us in the same box.”
Her fashion instincts, however, refuse the box entirely. “I just was being myself, I woke up one day, and bitches was like, ‘You are a fashion girl.’” Her status cemented when she wore the Martin Margiela 2009 glass heels for the “City Cinderella” artwork, found by vintage sourcer, Yuri Carter. “I was supposed to pull those shoes and pay insurance, and two days before my shoot the man calls and says I have to buy them because he can’t insure glass. And I’m like, ‘How much are they?’ They’re like $25,000. Lord. Glass shoes just to take a picture.” She pauses. “I’m so dedicated to getting a shot.” She cannot walk in them, but of course, she bought them.
After multiple campaigns, from Poster Girl to a Beats by Dre x Mowalola collab, another viral moment arrived when she performed with Doechii at the Dsquared2 show, for which she earned a Grammy. “We only had 24 hours to rehearse,” she recalls. “They were like, we want you to come out of your seat and close the show with Naomi Campbell. I was nervous as hell. Naomi is so much taller than me. I thought, how is that gonna work? Going down the runway with a real icon, and I know she don’t play. I was like, ‘Did she even agree? Are you sure?’ And they were like, ‘Yes, we want you both.’” She still sounds amazed. “Come on now, two Black girls from Florida, with Naomi Campbell in Milan. Crazy.”
Her collaborators reflect her range: Drake, Nicki Minaj, Kali Uchis, and a new track with Shygirl, produced by the late SOPHIE. That’s why she keeps close to visionaries like Nadia Lee Cohen, who recently directed the Aphex Twin music video JT cameoed in. “I need to be around these types of people. She did not give a fuck. She was up on a pole directing, like ‘JT, go, go, go!’ It was inspiring.”
Her devotion to the community that embraces her extends beyond music and fashion. The artist from Miami draws energy from the people around her, especially the women and queer creatives she keeps close. “I have so many great artistic women in my life, and the gays. I love to see women and their femininity. We are so powerful, and we do our own shit, and we show that we are more than sex.” JT consistently uses her platform to support the Trans community. She is vocal on social media, donates regularly and in July headlined NYC Pride wearing custom Luar, selling T-shirts printed with her lyric “pretty like a transgender” to raise money for the Trans Justice Funding Project.
As for what is next: she wants to stop buying bags and buy a house, though she does love Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel. She wants more music out without hesitation. She wants magazines, collaborations, and ownership. A career with reach. “My career, I’m satisfied,” she says. “I want to be creatively free. I want more collabs, more fashion brands, and my own stuff. I want to own a lot. I cannot wait for everyone to hear my debut album.” She is constantly striving to be at her best game, but for a moment, she pauses, satisfied: “I ate this year up.”
We finish our call after nearly an hour, and just before she logs off she leaves me with her most important advice. “Surround yourself with the right people,” she says. “And if you can’t find the right people, isolate, and find your own path. Be different. Go the other way.”
Difference has always been her direction of travel. It’s the logic she has lived by – a refusal to move with the crowd when she can cut her own route.
JT went the other way, and we all followed.
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Photography by Mhamed Ace Amir Meraou
Styling by Max Weinstein at The Only Agency
Words by Moira González
Hair by Tevin Washington
Make-up by Raisa Flowers at EDMA World
Nails by Tiana Hardy
Producer Dakota Griffin of 199X New York
Photography Assistant Jaime Bonner
Fashion Assistant Sydney Dovi
Fashion Film Director/DP Mylo Butler
Video Assistant Kyle Farscht