Show Your Work, one of three full-lengths released by Moh Baretta in the past 13 months, doesn’t immediately sound nostalgic. The New York City rapper’s husky, drill-indebted flow blossoms over 24 tracks produced by members of the SoundCloud collective StudyGroup, sounding equally at home on melodic dark plugg (“ANTIBODIES”) as blown-out ambient trap (“WITHOUT YOU”), covering a wide expanse of the underground’s sonic territory. But when Moh was recording the album, he had rose-colored Cartiers tinting his vision. “Everybody misses high school at some point,” he tells me over the phone. “Everybody misses when things were just a little bit easier.”

For a rapper whose profile has faded since he emerged nearly four years ago, Moh Baretta is admirably disinterested in clutching onto past glories. His former collective Surf Gang exploded at the height of the pandemic in 2020, when lockdowns and unseen dangers had the rap world craving something as heartfelt as it was reckless. With glowing plugg-inspired melodies and a lyrical grit as unforgiving as asphalt hit at a high speed, Surf Gang quickly became one of the underground’s hottest acts. But things fell apart not long after their breakout moment, and Baretta departed after the release of 2022’s At Least We Tried.

Other members of Surf Gang have stayed more visible than Baretta in the years since. Evilgiane has become a titanic force in rap production, and Polo Perks (who left the group at same time as Baretta) received a boost of acclaim for A Dog’s Chance, 2024’s tape with FearDorian and Ayoolii. The main reason for Baretta’s relatively low profile is legal: in late 2022 he was arrested after an altercation with a security guard at the MGM Springfield in Massachusetts. Police discovered drugs on him, and he was initially charged with two felonies. He laid low until the case’s conclusion at the advice of his lawyer. “That caused me to lose momentum,” he tells me, “so this past year was all about getting that back.”

His trouble with the law and its effect on his career didn’t come up in our initial interview. A day later I was listening to “Expedited,” a song from 2024’s RE:VAMP, and Baretta’s raps, weary like old leather, tapped me gently on the shoulder: “I was in the shadows for like two years tryna dodge a sentence.” This perfectly captures Moh Baretta’s conscious designs: his lyrics are full of gruff flexing and memorable taunts, but also seeded with personal revelations and vulnerability you might not initially catch. The effect is a collection of music intended to grow with its listeners. “You can listen to something that I drop when it first comes out versus six months later when you went and accomplished something,” he says with pride, “and you're gonna fuck around and catch something in the song that's gonna make whatever you just went through or accomplished hit 20 times harder.”

And Baretta’s got a lot of stuff to sift through from the last year alone. Under Nights Until Two is a gritty horror-plug tape with production from #stepTeam founder ivvys, Aghast, and killjae; RE:VAMP, produced entirely by fakekickin, juggles a dark cloud-rap sound and trap that sounds like it was summoned from a graveyard by a possessed Zaytoven. The Exhile EP finds Baretta at his most agitated and experimental, while on his latest single, the winkingly-titled “Y TF HE AIN’T DIE,” he evokes his old Surf Gang sound to remind fans past and present of where his come-up began, and how it hasn’t ended. But it’s Show Your Work that gets Baretta the most excited for 2025, and he was eager to share his hopes for what's coming while looking back at how he’s been shaped by the past two years.

The FADER: You’ve been dropping like crazy over the past 12 months or so. How's your approach to making and releasing music changed over the past year?

I’ve been recording everything I’ve been making by myself since the end of 2023, so now I have more intention behind everything I’m doing. Being more hands on with how I create more than ever now also helps me multitask easier. For example, I started the process on Show Your Work while I was halfway done with the making of Re:Vamp around this time last year,

But it’s easy to have a bunch of things going on at the same time, ‘cause I got a secret weapon who can tie it altogether: my creative director, Wontworryagain. He’s been responsible for the cover art and rollout direction for my last 5 projects and having him to help me visually makes it easier. It becomes a whole different game when you have that type of creative freedom, and we both understand that’s how you make things last.

Under Nights Until 2 has the gothiest sonics of the stuff you put out in the past year.

I was on SoundCloud one day and I found this one rapper, killjae, and a producer named Aghast at the same time through this one song. It's like an ambient Philly beat, dark, but it's turnt at the same time. I just realized that it was a whole different world versus stuff that I was already used to in the past.

Under Nights Until 2 was a project I started making unconsciously right after Re:Vamp had dropped. Working with [fakekickin] and making the sounds we did for that tape made it easier for me to go in a darker direction. When I was making it it was summer time and I knew that most people wouldn’t get it until it was cold out. A lot of the stuff I’m making is with a time frame in mind. They’re like little lives I create.

One thing about me, I love experimenting with just music. Because that's what ultimately can get me better. I'm trying new stuff and I'm always trying to innovate. I'm always trying to be better than myself. Not really anybody else.

And how did you connect with fakekickin for RE:VAMP?

FK, that is my bro. I love him to death. I went through my DMs and he was DMing me since 2018 just showing support. And I was just like, “nah, I want to fuck with you on some music shit.” We met around two years ago in Brooklyn.

We were working on a tape for like nine months. We're running through pretty much every beat in his archive, in his discography. Just me on his ass, telling him what beats I want, exactly how to make them, whoop-de-woo.

I know that some rappers prefer to tell producers how to make the beats they want, and I’m interested in how that works for you versus asking for a pack.

I go off of attributes. When it comes to beats and shit, because I see certain things in certain producers. Certain producers are good at maintaining a bounce. Certain producers are really good at soundscaping when it comes to melodies and making things sound really crazy in the ears. Certain are just good with making an upbeat type of vibe.

You just got to know who you're working with, and figure out how you can push them forward in a direction that's going to benefit both you and them when working together. So that's really how I've been coming with it all the time.

From your SoundCloud, it's clear that you're tapped in with the various different sounds of the underground right now. You've got songs with ivvys, 444Jet, Jackzebra, all these different artists. You're obviously hungry to try new stuff, and I feel like a lot of rappers lose that after their initial hype has peaked. That they're just fine to do whatever initially got them popular.

Before I even think about making music to drop for other people, I'm making music for myself to listen to. A lot of the times, I'm not making things with the intent of dropping. I'll be making a song and I know it's not going to drop and I know it's just something I'm going to listen to.

With that being said, I feel like it's easier just knowing that I'm not scrambling to just make something that people like, because it's an extension of me first and foremost. You've got to be happy with yourself before anybody else can be happy with you. That's whether art is involved or not.

I think that applies to any medium that you want to take creatively and put out there into the world. I would say just knowing myself and just knowing what makes me happy about making music is enough to just keep me going every day and never stop.

Having been yourself, somebody who was attached to a quote-unquote trend in music, what insight can you give to younger rappers who are getting the attention now?

The most important thing is to be yourself. That's going to get you farther than anything else. Trying to be like somebody else isn't going to help you. If anything, it can only define you for the worse. So I feel like if you just practice individuality and just be who you are into the world, that type of stuff is going to reflect in your music. That's what people are going to want to hear and see from you at the end of the day. They want to see it.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity