Gazapizm

Elazığ, Konak and a label of his own

Anıl Murat Acar was born in Elazığ, in eastern Turkey, on 20 July 1988, and dates his involvement in Turkish hip-hop to 2003, when he was still in his teens. The working life, though, belongs to İzmir. He took a degree in public administration at Dokuz Eylül University, and in 2012, in the Konak district of the city, founded Argo İzmir — the imprint that has carried almost everything he has put out since, and which still appears on the credits of his newest single.

The decision to build a label rather than chase one mattered more than it might sound. Turkish rap in the early 2010s had no obvious commercial route; an artist operating out of İzmir rather than Istanbul had even less of one. Argo İzmir gave him a release mechanism he controlled, and a geography he never had to apologise for. The neighbourhood is not a backdrop in his writing, it is the subject.

The stage name has stuck through a career that has changed shape several times — from the underground records of his twenties to a mainstream audience, an orchestra collaboration, and most recently a feature-length film he wrote and directed himself.

Five albums, and the record that named the method

The discography runs in deliberate, widely spaced steps. Majör Depresyon arrived in 2009, made and circulated in the margins. Yeraltı Edebiyatı followed in 2014 — the title translates as underground literature, and it functions as a statement of method as much as a record title. Bir Gün Her Şey came in 2016, and HİZA in 2020.

Between those last two sits the outlier: Karanfil (Live in İzmir), an EP cut in 2019 with the Tepecik Filarmoni Orkestrası. Putting his material in front of an orchestra from a working-class İzmir district, rather than a prestige ensemble, is characteristic — the arrangement gets upgraded, the address does not change.

Five studio albums in fifteen years is a slow rate by the standards of a genre built on volume, and the gaps have been part of the shape. The four years between HİZA and its successor were the longest.

Çukur, and the arithmetic changes

The commercial break came from television. "Heyecanı Yok", released in 2017, was used in the Turkish series Çukur at a moment when rap was being pulled into primetime drama, and it took Gazapizm from a respected underground name to a national one. The following year brought a Golden Butterfly for Song of the Year and GQ Türkiye's Musician of the Year.

He spent the recognition on collaborations rather than consolidation: "Kalbim Çukurda" with the singer Cem Adrian in 2018, alongside "Ölüler Dirilerden Çalacak" the same year and "Kaç İstersen" in 2019. In 2020, "Unutulacak Dünler" finished among the most-streamed songs in Turkey for the year — a figure that put him on the same shelf as pop acts with far larger machines behind them.

None of this softened the writing. The subject matter stayed with poverty, loss and the people cities are built on top of, which is why the mainstream audience has never quite flattened into a pop audience.

Home, twice over: the album and the film

Dönmek İçin Eve was released on 10 May 2024, ending the longest pause of his career. Then, on 28 January 2026, he released a second version of it: a feature-length album film of the same title, which he wrote and directed. It was reported as among the first works of that scale and ambition in Turkish music, and he put it out in the open rather than behind a paid platform.

The film follows a character named Anıl moving between cities and encounters, and treats the idea of home less as an address than as an unfinished negotiation with the past — loss, guilt, and whether there is anywhere to return to. A review on the culture site Wannart singled out its refusal to make poverty picturesque, arguing that it holds the darkness of streets that sit beneath large cities without dressing it up.

The film also resolved something about the project. An album built around returning home was, within two years, followed by a stadium concert in the neighbourhood the record came from — a sequence that reads as planned whether or not it was.

Where things stand, autumn 2026

The most recent release is "Amazon", a single issued on 15 May 2026 through Argo, with music and mixing by Okan Çam and mastering by Million Dollar Snare, released with a video. It followed "Aborjin" in 2025, and landed the day before the biggest show he has played.

The touring year began abroad. A short European run in February 2026 took in Düsseldorf on the 6th, Rotterdam on the 7th and London's Islington Assembly Hall on the 8th — mid-size halls rather than arenas, aimed largely at Turkish diaspora audiences. Turkey then got the scale: the Gürsel Aksel Stadium in Konak on 16 May, Milyonfest Didim in Aydın on 5 September, and Ritual Fest at Life Park İstanbul over 17–18 October, where he plays the first day on a bill with Göksel, Mavi Gri, No.1 and Sufle.

Two further dates are on sale, both indoor and both away from his usual strongholds: Two Garden Arena in Diyarbakır on Saturday 14 November 2026, and the EKM Erciyes Kültür Merkezi in Kayseri the following night. Listings currently show him touring in one country only, with no second European leg announced.

Three hours in the rain

The 16 May show was billed as the first concert ever held at Göztepe's Gürsel Aksel Stadium. Gazapizm announced it with a line from one of his own songs about a long table set up in the middle of the neighbourhood, and framed it plainly in a press statement: performing on the ground of the club he supports, in the district he comes from.

It did not go smoothly. Heavy rain fell throughout, and Göztepe had just lost ground in a fixture against Samsunspor before doors. Writing in Hürriyet on 21 May, the columnist Sinem Vural described a set that ran close to three hours with guests including Zeynep Bastık and Melike Şahin, and was glad to see the visual world of his records translated onto a stadium stage — but reported that opened umbrellas across the stand blocked sightlines and that the vocals reached the pitch so faintly it was demoralising. The crowd stayed out in it regardless, which is the detail he picked up on afterwards when he thanked the audience for singing through three hours of rain. Her column closed on the view that İzmir's rhythm has caught up with Istanbul's.