Combining a brooding wit with a flair for technical rhyme, Damso rode his ruminant couplets to become one of the most celebrated artists in francophone rap. Born William Kalubi in 1992 in Kinshasa (in what’s now Democratic Republic of the Congo) and raised in Brussels, Belgium, Damso spearheaded his adoptive homeland’s emergence into the neighbouring French rap scene with his morose trap debut Batterie Faible in 2016. A year later, his second LP Ipséité shattered the records for Belgian rap sales and intricately underlined his view of social ills, a theme he would further with 2018’s Lithopédion, an elegiac coalescence of conceptual allegories and relationship cynicism that boasted the dexterous ode to tainted love “Feu de bois”. Damso expanded his musical and lyrical palette on his 2021 album QALF Infinity, declaring a life-shifting change as a new father and sharing renewed reflections on relationships, submitting another introspective chapter in an eminent career at the vanguard of rap francais.