Niontay Explains His Credit Card Statement
The New York-via-Florida rapper-producer talks through recent purchases, including a replacement for a stolen pair of designer sneakers, a pistol for his mother, and one of his favorite desserts in New York City.
Credit History is an interview series where we ask our favorite artists to comb through their credit card statements and tell us about what they bought, from the necessary to the frivolous to the outlandish.
“I’m Mr. HaveMyWay, and you can’t do nothin’ ‘bout it!,” Niontay says in his thick Florida twang near the beginning of his latest album Fada<3of$ (pronounced “For the love of money”). For the Brooklyn-based rapper-producer, that’s as much a statement about his musical range as it is his luck. Since releasing his earliest songs in 2020 with collaborators like fellow Floridian 454 and joining up in 2023 with Mike’s label 10k to release his formal debut, Dontay’s Inferno, Niontay has carved his own engrossing niche. He can call out street dudes who “sing like Mariah” (The Scientist, not Carey) over glitchy Florida-style production as well as he can spit about Black power and the benefits of a sea moss-heavy diet over scuzzy guitars and dubby drums. On the surface, his music might seem out of place next to the meditative, sample-based koans of Mike or Sideshow, but the throughline between them, and every other member of 10k, is a penchant for mixing regional sounds and moods into a whole as elegant and brash as high-end streetwear. On Fada<3of$, Niontay moves wildly between both sides of this binary and drops some of the most fun and intense music of his career so far.
When he answers our video call on the first day of May, he’s still got some shit to talk. He’s just finished a brief stint on Mike’s Artists of the Century tour and is settling back into his life. At a time when he’s as likely to be gracing a stage somewhere in the United States or Europe as he is relaxing in his Brooklyn apartment, he’ll take every chance he can get to just post up. Being busy means he can provide for his family—his mother and sister in Florida, his girlfriend in London—and he’s always quick to mention how much they mean to him. There’s a balance between the practical and the superfluous with Niontay’s recent purchases, one that displays the benefits of holding your people down while not ignoring the positives of a good splurge.
