Tory Lanez has been busy—just take a look at his DatPiff catalogue, and you'll find 10 mixtapes he's released since 2010, and those are just the ones he hasn't had taken down in a fit of history-cleansing. Now, three years after releasing his debut tape Just Landed (captioned "Its A New Genre Of Music !!! CANADA!" on DatPiff), Lanez is having a reinvention of sorts.

No longer struggling to find confidence in his voice or message, the Canada-by-way-of-Houston rapper/singer has found a creative sanctuary in the Southern-tinged soundscapes of Florida and Texas, and has employed them in his new tunes. His progression is most evident (and most successful) on his recent breakout hit "Know What's Up," which features a verse from H-Town hero Kirko Bangz, video cameos from Bun B and Slim Thug and a slapping, outer-space beat from DJ Mustard.

While Lanez may be more prolific than he is well-known, he's hoping that's about the change. And with the video for "Up" now garnering close to half a million views, Tory's finally come out the other side of the grind with all eyes on him. Before the release of his new mixtape, Conflicts Of My Soul (out tomorrow, August 8), XXL sat down with Lanez to discuss the video, his hometown of Toronto and finally coming into his own. —Dan Buyanovsky

The video for your new single "Know What's Up" is awesome.
It's a dope ass video. There's naked white chicks in it. We basically googled "Houston Mansion," and we found the biggest house in Houston. So we rented it out, but we didn't have a lot of time to shoot it. It was actually done in three hours. We were trying to shoot a lot, but with all the cameos...Shout out to Bun B, shout out to Slim Thug for coming through and showing love. But we had to just do it as quick as possible. Tyler Yee directed it. He's a sick director. I met him when I was on this G-Eazy tour. I didn't even see any of his videos, I just knew he was nice.

We rented the place for like five hours, but you gotta realize this is a place where you're going in and there's mad Roman architecture on the wall. [Laughs] The lady who owns it got all the pieces in her house from an Argentinian coliseum, so her shit is sculpted in the wall. There's golden trim and crazy things everywhere, and then you got us just coming in. You got Kirko and Slim Thug, who's bringing their posse. Then you got models walking around in bikinis and lingerie.

Shout out to the Borrego twins. They're these two twin model chicks from Texas. They're really dope, and they're good homies of mine. Chloe...there's this girl from Houston who's the blonde chick on the couch that's naked. [Laughs] She's cool. She seems like a nice lady. [Laughs] I didn't know everybody at the shoot, but I for damn sure got some numbers.

You're originally from Toronto but you've recently spent time in Florida and Texas. Is that where your recent embrace of the Southern sound comes from? 
[My sound] came from both [Florida and Texas]. I recorded the entire new project in Florida, but right before that I was in Texas and that was where I got all of the ideas for the tape. My management and my team are out there, and they're not just my management and business people, it's more like my family. So, I was out there kickin' it and enjoying the weather.

How do you feel about Toronto's music scene?
I think that we're an extremely talented city. I'm obviously a fan of Drake. I'm a fan of The Weeknd as well. I feel like we're paving a new sound with this airy, cloudy, dark type of music, but it's still rockin'. I'm very proud of the way it's going right now.

My plan is to be the biggest musician in the world, and nothing is going to stop that from happening. That doesn't mean that I'm gonna stray away from Toronto music, because that's what I listen to, but I do have to make that world-sounding music, so I do try to pull from other places of the world instead of just Toronto.

toryslide-620x400
loading...

What do you want fans to take away from your new mixtape?
I want people to go into it with the mind state that my project isn't just a project, it's an audio film. I want people to realize that I didn't make this music as one body of work just so all the songs could be good songs and have no significance to the song before them. I want people to realize that the way the events are placed on the project, it's like a movie. So when you listen to the project from back to front, you'll hear it like an audio movie.

Honestly, it's just real. It's just really my life. It's an autobiography based on my life and crazy events that I'm not allowed to speak on because it could get me indicted. [Laughs] I'm bringing you that, and you just gotta read between certain lines to understand what's going on.

You were featured on our site on The Break in 2011, and there are a bunch of comments on that story saying that you should've been a XXL Freshman back then. What's it like to be buzzing now, two years later?
I feel like everything happens in the right timing, and everything happens for a reason. And even though my fans...I think everything that's happening in my life at this time, is meant to happen at this time. Because maybe the music wasn't ready at that time. Maybe I didn't know certain things.

I took a lot of time to really go back and not drop nothing. Like, I didn't put out new music for a year. As somebody that's just coming out, that's very hard to do because as a new artist you always want to be dropping consistently. But I took that time to be like, "Let me make sure that this tape is just not some tape that's gonna go out like the rest." This has gotta be the one. I took some time and I just created it.

Are there fans from 2010 who are still fucking with you? 
Yes. I think that if you fuck with me as a person, you're going to fuck with me forever. I've never changed for no one; I never break my balls for no one. I'm the same person that you see right now, and when I walk out of this office I'm going to be the same. So once you fuck with me as a person, you're always going to relate to me.

More From XXL