sosocamo makes smooth-toned trap on big country

“As soon as I made ‘keep steady,’ I was just like, ‘Damn,’ like — this shit sound beautiful n***a,” sosocamo says. He remembers showing the impending hit to his executive producer Grayto. “We just sat in silence for a few minutes like, ‘This shit is one of them ones.’”

Nearly 70 million Spotify plays later, it’s easy to understand the runaway success of “keep steady,” which filters the bounce of trap music through a lens of R&B-minded moodsetting. And while everything’s been moving pretty fast over the past 18 months, the 23-year-old from North Carolina has put in the work to maximize his moment.

He’s built a visual aesthetic around Bass Pro Shop staples and refined his strain of moody, melodic trap. His songs blend Future, Brent Faiyaz, and Pi’erre Bourne into narcotic late night jams, showing off the ultra-smooth vocal chops he developed during formative years in the church choir.

When we connect on a video call a week out from the release of his sophomore album big country, sosocamo (née Cameron Sanders) is posted up at his apartment in New York and riding high as he recounts bygone days of driving to McDonald’s to upload songs on their wifi before his hometown got fiber optic.

The youngest of four children in Apex, North Carolina, a “rural” area 30 minutes outside the city of Raleigh, Sanders says he grew up in “a real musical household,” where everyone played an instrument. Besides choir, he played the guitar, and began recording his own raps around 14.

Things coalesced for sosocamo when he met executive producer Grayto through a classmate at school. She’s produced on the vast majority of his songs; the pair are also high school sweethearts. In conversation, he’s quick to credit her for influencing his sound and ensuring his projects are as cohesive as possible (“Sometimes artists can be close-minded and feel like they have to do everything,” he shrugs).

“no service was the album that was my introduction to the music business,” sosocamo says of his debut. “But now I feel like big country is really going to stamp me as an artist bro, cuz the quality of the music has just gone up.”

The FADER caught up with sosocamo to chat about how he met his main producer, crafting his visuals, and locking in to record his sophomore album big country.

When did you start taking music more seriously?
sosocamo: Growing up through my teenage years, I just did it for fun. But once I turned 19 — really when I met my girlfriend Grayto — that was the turning point for me. Before we started dating, we were just sending each other beats back and forth or songs back and forth online for about a year. And once she came to see me and once we started collaborating more seriously — that’s when I was taking TikTok more seriously, posting three times a day for weeks and months. Same on her side too, she would be going viral too. So we were both just bouncing off each other, inspiring each other.
And I remember when my girlfriend made her first check off of music, I was just like, ‘Damn,’ like, this shit is real. Like I can really be serious and go crazy.

I know she’s executive produced your last two projects, so I did want to ask how you guys met. Was it a personal or professional relationship at first?
It was a professional relationship at first and then a personal relationship. She actually lived in Jacksonville, Florida, at the time. I was still in North Carolina and we were both in high school, but one of her friends that she grew up with went to my high school.
And I was the high school SoundCloud rapper, so her friend was just like, “Yo, there’s this dude that raps up here and your beats are fire. Let me connect y’all.” And once we started making music over about a year we just found a way to connect and it was just history from there.

When you think about those first beats she sent or that you hopped on, what grabbed you about them?
I was just a fan of her work, to be honest. At first, I didn’t even know what she looked like — she would only post faceless videos of her beats. So it was really genuine, she was just really talented. At the time she was making Lil Uzi type beats, and that was just my taste at the time for real.
But it’s crazy how our sounds have developed over the past few years. We just been putting up so many shots bro, putting up so many reps, and you know, with us being together side by side all the time, it was just… I don’t know, it was inevitable it would turn into something crazy.

Taking it back to “keep steady,” you had mentioned earlier doing three TikToks a day, so I know you’ve had a mind for the attention economy aspect of this. You record the song, you and your producer/girlfriend realize it’s a hit. What was that process like in terms of how you pushed the song?
For some reason we were just like, let’s do this shit the right way, or try as hard as we can to present it to people. Usually before that, I would just drop a song randomly, stand up in my bathroom or somewhere in the crib and just dance in front of the camera. But when we made “keep steady,” I was like, “Bro, let’s really go hard with the branding, go as hard as we can DIY to make this presentable.” I remember we were going to Bass Pro Shops, getting camo pants, putting ghillies on in my videos, just getting things that aligned with my world. I was just trying to up the look and really brand myself.
As soon as I did that I feel like my videos instantly started doing better because people were looking at it like, “this guy’s putting effort into his videos; this is actually like somebody that’s trying to build a brand and build something real.”

I wanted to ask about recording no service last year. Were you already in a distro deal? What was recording that project like?
I got my first distro deal maybe a month or two after dropping the song, and no service was like a byproduct of that. I was trying to balance school and music: shit did not work. [laughs] I just said f*** school, bro. And to be honest, I feel like I had to cuz, bro, to really go all the way and to really take this s*** serious, I personally believe you have to immerse yourself and be all in.
But the process of making that album was stressful — well, not stressful, it was fun. But it was just a lot cuz I’m doing school online, but I’m also flying to New York and LA every week. I’m working with a whole bunch of new producers I never had access to. Like Rio Leyva — I remember I used to grow up watching Rio streams, the Internet Money shit. Now all of a sudden I’m working with this n***a in the studio.
It was just a crazy time last year, so making that album was all over the place. Like I made a lot of the songs in my mom’s basement, but I I definitely made a lot of the other songs in New York and LA. That time was just an emotional roller coaster.

When you think about your recording process on big country versus the last album, what feels different on this new record?
I’d say the difference between my first album and big country would be the producer camps that I did. For no service, I wasn’t meeting with producers like that a lot of the time. For big country, we did a one week long camp in New York and we did a one week long camp in LA too. And I feel like a lot of magic happened in that camp cuz the way they were set up. I had my own room to myself where I could record and track myself, and then I had another room just for producers to come through, work with my girlfriend. So it was really a great opportunity for her to just meet a whole bunch of producers and for me to just knock out songs.
During the camp, I was probably doing two or three songs a day. So by the time both of the camps were over, along with all of my unreleased, we had hundreds of songs to choose from for real. I feel like that’s the biggest difference between no service and big country. I didn’t have as much songs to choose from on my previous album, but now I feel like I chose the best songs that I have and it’s just undeniable music.

What’s your dream merch?
I have a few that I’ve written down. [pulls out phone] Okay. I would say a John Deere collab would be fire. Goddamn, a Takashi Murakami collab would be lit; that’s probably my dream one for real. Bass Pro Shop collab would be fire. Carhartt would be lit.

What would the John Deere X sosocamo collab look like?
I’ll sell tractors to n***as. Or anything!