Black Kray

Ashland, a laptop microphone, and the Klan

Timothy O'Neal Mills was born in Richmond, Virginia on 23 February 1994 and grew up in Ashland, the small college town twenty-odd minutes north of the city. He started recording around 2009 and 2010 into the microphone built into a laptop, which set a tolerance for texture that has never really left the work — the murk was there before it was a choice.

His first affiliation was not a Virginia one. He joined the skate team attached to Raider Klan, the Miami collective built around SpaceGhostPurrp, which in the early 2010s functioned as a distribution network for a particular strain of slowed, tape-hiss southern rap. The route in was boards and forums rather than a local scene, and the habit stuck: for most of his career the audience has arrived through links passed between people who already knew what they were looking for.

That grounding explains the shape of everything after it. Mills has never been an artist who waited for a label to open a door, because the door he used was one he and his friends built.

Goth Money, and a genre with a name

In 2012, with Karmah and Hunned Mill, Mills co-founded Goth Money Records and released Crack Cloud$ Over Art$$ Kitchen. The following year he relocated to Los Angeles and the roster widened. As of 2024 the founding line-up around him reads Hunned Mill, Kane Grocerys and Luckaleannn. Goth Money has remained his home label without interruption — the 2026 record still goes out under the imprint.

Between 2014 and 2016 the connections multiplied outwards in two directions at once: to the Swedish Drain Gang orbit of Bladee and Yung Lean, and to the Philadelphia production collective Working on Dying. Those years are also when Mills is credited with developing tread, the sub-genre that grew out of his cadence and drum choices, and which is now a reference point for producers who were children when he started.

The music itself sits between cloud rap, witch house, trap and emo rap: melodic, hazy, deliberately unresolved. It is not a style that rewards a first listen at volume in a car park, which is part of why its influence spread faster than its numbers did.

The tapes that carry the name

The catalogue is large and it is not tidy, which is the point. 700 Dagreez (2014) and Thug Angel (2015) are the early reference points. In 2016 he adopted the Sickboyrari alias with Working Out da Mud, and has used it in parallel ever since — along with Gvcci Kray, 10k Motorola and LA Goth, all of which turn up on artwork, Bandcamp handles and marquees. City of Crows arrived in 2022, Ballad of a Glime in 2024 and Sahel Dreamz in 2025.

The current record is Posted Where Da Scarecrows Play, released on 13 January 2026 through Goth Money: twelve tracks, no guests listed, and a production credit sheet dominated by REMGHOST, who produced or co-produced seven of them. GOTHBAND1T opens the tape on 'TATTOO' and returns on 'ES ON ME LYKE EVISUS PT 2'; 4EVR handles '28S ONAH FIN' and 'DAYS INN'; TAMINO404, SLAYWITME, EJ, CRANES, KYURO, JOLST, FIREMANE and RADKOUN fill in the rest.

The titles do the work the press release would otherwise do — 'COUNTY LINE', 'SNIPEMODE', 'KEEP SUM BANDZ ON ME LYKE GOGO IN DC', and one that runs to twenty-two words about bald fades and gold teeth. Nothing about the sequencing suggests an attempt to be legible to a first-time listener, and the record has been received accordingly: as another instalment rather than a reintroduction.

Where he stands in 2026

The bridge to a larger audience was built by association. Mills features on Bladee's Cold Visions, released in 2024, which put his voice in front of a Drain Gang listenership that overlaps heavily with the one now filling American amphitheatres for rap acts that have never had radio support.

On 31 March 2026, $uicideboy$ announced Grey Day 2026, a thirty-three-date arena and amphitheatre run across North America opening on 29 August at Mystic Lake Amphitheater in Shakopee, Minnesota and closing on 20 October at the Coca-Cola Amphitheater in Birmingham, Alabama. Presale opened on 2 April and general sale on 3 April. Black Kray is named in the support lineup alongside Destroy Lonely, Shoreline Mafia, Shakewell, Drain and $lim Gucci, with the billing rotating by leg — Destroy Lonely across the opening dates and the closing stretch, Shoreline Mafia taking the featured slot from 26 September through the Austin date on 13 October.

The scale of what he has walked into is worth stating plainly. $uicideboy$'s 2025 album Thy Kingdom Come entered the Billboard 200 at number four, and Billboard Boxscore ranked the previous Grey Day the fourth highest-grossing hip-hop tour of 2025. Seventeen dates remain on Black Kray's run as of late September 2026, from the Utah First Credit Union Amphitheatre in West Valley City on 26 September through to Birmingham on 20 October, taking in Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle, Shoreline Amphitheatre in Mountain View, two nights each in Phoenix and Albuquerque, the Smoothie King Center in New Orleans and Amerant Bank Arena in Sunrise.

Then, on 31 October, he headlines The National in Richmond — the one date on the schedule with no $uicideboy$ attached to it, in the city he was born in. Songkick lists 31,360 people tracking his movements.

The amphitheatre slot

A Grey Day night is a six-act shift and Black Kray works the early end of it. At Riverbend Music Center in Cincinnati on 11 September, doors opened at 5pm and music started at 6:30pm with $lim Gucci, with Black Kray on second, followed by Drain, Shakewell, Destroy Lonely and $uicideboy$ closing. That is a set played in daylight, to a lawn and a general-admission pit that is still filling, and it is short by necessity.

The production is the headliners' — a shared amphitheatre stage with no room for an opener to reset it — and the house rules have been tightened at the artists' request: no lawn chairs, a clear-bag policy, drinks decanted into provided cups in the pit and the front sections. It is a blunter environment than the small rooms where this catalogue was made, and it puts fourteen years of deliberately low-fidelity, heavily reverbed rap through a rig built for stadium trap.

One dollar from every ticket on the tour goes to PLUS1 for mental health work, continuing a partnership the tour has run for several cycles.