Xang. Photo via artist
Before becoming an ambient trap pioneer, Xang was content to be a loose thread in the tapestry of DMV hip-hop. “I felt like I wasn't the main character, like I don’t really need rap,” the 24-year-old Maryland rapper tells me over the phone. The plugg music he was making before 2022 was standard issue in a scene saturated by its woozy melodies and thumping beats. By comparison, ambient trap was fresher, its sonics built on unpredictable drum patterns and cinematic synths. At 22, the artist born Roy Ngamy Noutchang stripped away anything that wasn’t Xang — school, work, old ways of thinking — and committed to music with total dedication. “I stopped doing everything I was trained to do. It was like, Damn, all I have is music.”
A first-generation American born to Cameroonian parents, Xang grew up on Michael Jackson and 50 Cent. But he didn’t start taking music seriously until he graduated from high school and theo, a producer and fellow Maryland-based artist, introduced him to ambient trap. “He opened my eyes to the ambient scene,” Xang says, “He showed me that it’s a world of underground rap out there.”
A founder of the loose collective DPM (Deep and Powerful Music), theo helped form the germ of ambient trap’s sound. The subgenre is occasionally conflated with cloud rap, but it’s more than just another iteration of the Clams Casino/Friendzone sonic palette — i.e., pillowy, distorted samples of artists like Gigi Masin and Imogen Heap evoking endless greener pastures — ambient trap became something else thanks in part to theo’s keen ear. Over the phone, theo tells me he, “was combining nineties and two thousands ambient with plugg and stuff like that.”
DPM’s membership keeps its output dynamic. fk’s production, for example, leans more to the 808 Mafia end of the spectrum, while westly’s beats bring Detroit deep techno energy to plugg’s thumping arena. For much of the past two years, Xang has made what he calls “headphone music” — songs that skip and jump like early Warp glitch, welding hazy melodies to cyberpunk military drum patterns (DPM’s production has inspired ivvys and #stepTeam, another crew that’s making waves).
Every bass frequency tickles new hairs deep within your inner ear; Xang’s voice, like Young Nudy guzzling gallons of syrup, is a mostly indecipherable fog, taking the philosophy of “I’m not rapping, I’m just talking” to a level occupied by snake handlers on Ativan. It’s the kind of flow that, if Carti unlocked it for I AM MUSIC, would hold fans down for another five years.
Of course, Xang’s newfound commitment to music meant he was done staying still. 2023 EPs guerilla tactics and the angels floss their teeth with my bones, a five-track freakout with ian collaborator .cutspace, paved the way for moments that scooted up more closely to trap, like Moh Baretta collab Exile. “Over the years [ambient trap] turned into something you can go on a run to, [something] you can dance to,” Xang tells me. In that regard he’s kept pace, even excelled: The mutant house of “Vogue 2” is limber and ready for the club, while “No Problem” gives cathartic pop-punk melodies a grungier, blown-out edge.
Xang was already finding fresh and cohesive new directions for ambient trap by the time he dropped his excellent mixtape WOMB (Watch Over My Body) in early March. But he wanted the project’s various energies to be starker, more undeniable. “I wanted to show people that I’m not a one trick pony,” he says. “I can make ambient songs in five minutes if I wanted to, [but] that's not why I got in the game.” His desire to leave it all on the table makes WOMB one of 2025’s most sonically vibrant projects, boasting a broad stylistic range and the skill to tie it all together.
So the hyper-rhythmic trance revival of “by yourself” somehow sounds perfectly at home next to “paid,” an abandoned Brutalist structure with – literally, put on your headphones – wolves and sheep roaming its halls. A few overt nods to hip-hop’s past situates WOMB as part of a wider lineage: The excerpt of Lenny Williams’ “‘Cause I Love You” on “paid,” a melody most famously sampled on “Celebrity Overnight” by Twista, ties together nicely with the epileptic Zaytoven melodies of “cake got baked.” Most of the time, WOMB sounds closer to an avant-garde club project than any prevailing notion of underground hip-hop, like your SoundCloud feed got invaded by Andy Stott.
Throughout it all, Xang’s voice is clearer than ever. His vocals on his earlier work deliberately served more as a texture than lyric instrument. “I didn't care enough to even try to pronounce the words,” Xang says. “It was just how I'm feeling it right now.” On WOMB, a more fully formed picture emerges, of Xang as a hustler ready for violence while tortured by it, his trigger finger as itchy as it is sore. Whether you can understand what Xang is saying or not, there’s a passion beneath his monotone drawl, the raw feeling of a human being vulnerable to the same flaws and setbacks as anyone else.
“Six months ago, I told myself I was done rapping,” Xang admits. The cheerfulness in his voice disappears for the first time in our call. “I've been living on my own since I was 19. I was thinking, could I be doing more if I wasn't rapping?” But he came back from the brink to create WOMB, with collaborative tapes with Chinapoet, .cutspace, and theo also in the works. Fans and his DPM family helped change his mind, but so did a sense of unfinished business.
“I do know the times we are in, you got to be innovative,” he says with a grin. “You got to hit them with something they never heard before.”
