With Gap Year, Laila! Is More Than a Viral Moment — She’s Here to Stay

There is nothing average about Laila! — at only 18, the singer, songwriter, rapper, and producer is working toward becoming one of Generation Z’s next influential artists. Even at 4, the Brooklynite knew her purpose was to create music and become an entertainer. She vividly remembers around her second birthday, her father, Yasiin Bey (formerly known as Mos Def), gifted her a Yamaha drum pad set. While maybe not the most practical gift, it was an apt one. 

“He always knew from the beginning I was gonna be an artist of my own,” she tells Refinery29 Somos at a recording studio in Brooklyn. “He's always given me the space to create whatever I wanted. It's fun being able to go back and forth on melodies with him and just jam out. We can talk through music in a way that I think is really special.” 

Her family knew of her musical talents early on. It’s why they began calling her Baby Genius, a nickname she still uses as she shows in her “Like That” music video. It was even obvious to those outside her circle. In her first interview, which took place in August 2024, radio personality Angela Yee recalls meeting 9-year-old Laila!, listening to her freestyle, and being impressed by her skills. Seeing the artist in her then, Yee told her that, in the future, they would sit down for her first interview. And that’s exactly what happened ahead of the September 6 release of her debut album, Gap Year. Titled after her own experience of taking a year off school, Laila! welcomes us into her world of nostalgic R&B through 17 tracks. The Black Dominicana wrote and produced the album alone, resulting in throwback ‘90s and early 2000s R&B sound and soulful melodies through a 2024 lens. 

While her middle school peers bumped the trendy songs of the moment, Laila! was busy listening to her “very extensive” curated R&B and hip-hop playlists. “None of the kids my age knew or liked any of the songs I was listening to. I kind of always felt left out,” she says. 

Whenever there was a school dance or holiday party, she’d search “new songs” and learn the lyrics on YouTube ahead of the events. “I didn't know any of the songs,” she says. “All the kids would listen to new mainstream [music]. The school would get a DJ that would play whatever was on the radio at the time. This was in 2017 and I didn't know the music. I just didn't know what was new.” Instead, she was sonically in the ‘90s and ‘00s, listening to artists like Brandy, her biggest musical influence. With Brandy, the Moesha actress’ debut album that dropped when she was 15, Laila! felt inspired that a kid could create such impactful music. “I spent so much time listening to her work,” she adds. “I feel she is truly ‘The Vocal Bible.’ I'm so inspired by her journey making music and starting off so young. She had so much to say, and so much to give to the world.” Lauryn Hill, Mariah Carey, and Aaliyah are others who have a special place on her playlist. 

“Growing up, my mom played me so much good R&B music,” she says. “That made me feel good and just safe and happy, and I wanted to make something like that, too.” Take her song “Blackberry (Date 4 Prom);” it samples Mista’s "Blackberry Molasses," a healing and sorrowful tune. “It’s a very classic kind of ‘90s song,” she says. “I think that song is very beautiful. It's the only sample on the project, actually.”

She also spent hours creating music, rapping, singing, dancing, and writing, as a form of expression that was simultaneously a calming energy in her life. As a kid, she was afraid of the dark. Her mom turned off all the lights in hopes of helping her combat that fear, and Laila! would sing to herself. “Whenever I felt scared, I could just sing and I wouldn't feel as scared. That's kind of how I still feel now, whenever I feel afraid about anything, I start to make up melodies,” she says. “Even with beats, I make beats whenever I’m feeling anything — happy, mad, sad. It all kind of helps me take my mind off of whatever is plaguing me or bothering me.” 

What she appreciates most about songwriting is that it is malleable. Just because she writes about a topic doesn’t mean the listener will interpret it in the same way. She adds, “It could be my self-expression of anxiety, but someone else could take it as a love song, or anything else really.”

However, not all parts of making music were welcoming. At 14, a global pandemic made it impossible for Laila! to go to high school. Instead, she attended school remotely through Zoom. That’s when she started to teach herself how to make beats on GarageBand, but she quickly realized that the producer world was a boys club; some people couldn’t believe she was behind the production of her beats. “When I started getting into making beats, I noticed how there's this super weird culture around making beats, where it's guys trying to tell you how to do shit, like if you don't use this certain plug-in, or if you don't use a certain VSTS, then your beats are trash,” she says. While that could have discouraged her, she realized she was good at it and kept at it.   

By her junior year of high school, she considered releasing her songs but ultimately decided against it. “I was so nervous because I have anxiety,” she says. I” would be worried of being embarrassed, that people would be like, ‘This sucks.’ I just didn't know how to just let go and do it.” But soon enough, she told herself she had nothing to lose. “That’s where it all started, where I was like, ‘Okay, I can do this. This is what I've always wanted to do,’” she says. “So from that moment, when I put out my first song ever, ‘Like That,’ that’s when people started paying attention to my music. 

And just like that, Laila! went viral on TikTok. As the track did numbers on social media, she realized that people weren’t actually attributing the song to her; instead, it was “a sound” spreading through TikTok. “People didn't even know this was a real song. With ‘Like That,’ it was like everyone knew the sound-byte, but they didn't really know who I was.” 

As she continued to promote her music, her follower count swelled but so did the negativity. After she went viral with her On The Radar Radio performance of “Not My Problem,” people questioned whether Mos Def was her father. But even that couldn’t overshadow what she had accomplished. This summer, Bronx artist and producer Cash Cobain sampled the hook off “Not My Problem” and added in a star-studded line-up of artists like 6lack, Flo Milli, Anycia, and Big Sean. 

Virality aside, Laila! wants to prove that she is more than “just a TikTok artist.” “I want to show people that I'm more than two viral moments. I'm an artist, and I really do plan on having a long career,” she says. “I have so many goals, and I want to work with so many different artists, and I just have all these ambitions.” 

Gap Year is a step in that direction. “I gained so much of an audience, and people are really listening to my music,” she says. “It all just feels like a dream, you know? I didn't anticipate it would happen the way that it did. I learned so much about myself, seeing how hard I work when it comes to something I actually care about. I feel like in school, my teachers always said, ‘She's so smart, but she doesn't work to her full potential.’ When it came to making music, the way I showed up for myself, I feel like that's one thing that I'm most proud of. Seeing how hard I could work at something that I really actually love and be so passionate about, versus what I was learning in school.”

Caring so much propels her, even when facing all “the rules that [men] have created,” like who is a real producer and who isn’t. “Anybody can make a good beat,” she says. “Steve Lacy was making beats off his phone. I make beats off GarageBand on my mom's computer. At the end of the day, I'm a musician, I hear things in such a special, different way, and I want to show people that.”

As she shows people who she is — through the words she writes and the “tiny hi-hat and the little percussion details in the back” — her family offers unyielding support. Her dad and mom (who is her momager) both backed her up when she decided to take a gap year. Her grandmother, who is a big part of her life, needed a little more convincing. “My grandma always supported me, but she was kind of like, ‘You need to go to college. You can make music, but go to college for music.’ She didn't really understand. She's a Dominican grandma. Now that she sees me out in the world doing what I do, it's great to have support from my grandma, who is super traditional.”  On the track “Mami Nelly,” which is what she calls her grandmother, there’s a 20-second voicemail from her abuela telling her how much she loves her. “Growing up as a kid, I spent so much time with her, especially because my mom, she's a teacher, so while my mom was at work, I spent so much time with her. She's my rock, like she's always been there for me,” she says of her decision to include Mami Nelly on the album.

A couple of months ago on TikTok, Laila! posted a video of herself vibing to a bachata version of “Like That.” In the future, she hopes to tap into her roots more. “If not a project, just like something where I'm singing in Spanish because I feel like at the end of the day, even if my Spanish isn't the best, I am still Dominican, “ she says. “I want to go back to DR soon and bask in my culture because I love being Dominican. I can sing in Spanish, too, and I want to show people that. Also so my grandma can hear me singing in Spanish, to have a song in Spanish.” 

With Gap Year, the Baby Genius hopes her audience sees how personal this project is to her and that people see themselves in it, too. “It’s for everybody, but it’s mainly an ode to kids my age,” she says. “Whether it's love or feeling like you're not enough, or feeling happy and on top of the world, but then also feeling insecure. I feel like all of my songs, we touch on those moments. A teenage roller coaster, in a sense, like it's kind of everything that I've gone through in this period of time, a year out, of being in the real world. ​​Taking the gap year itself was a new chapter, and now this project is a whole new chapter as well. I have such an emotional connection to the project.  It's so personal to me, and I just want people to feel something.” 

In three years, when she’s 21, she sees herself at the Grammys with several producer credits under her belt for artists like SZA, Frank Ocean, Tyler, the Creator, and Solange. Just like her father, she also plans to start acting. She says, “I want to be one of the most influential artists of my time ever.”