Liim Lasalle Is Just Like You. His Music Isn’t Like Anyone Else’s.

“I’m just a regular dude,” says Liim Lasalle when asked to introduce himself.

The 22-year-old spends his days outside, hanging out with his friends in the Lower East Side like a regular dude. Pit-stopping at Toms Juice like a regular dude. Bumping SahBabii and Project Pat like a regular dude. Cold-plunging like a regular dude. Loitering at Supreme like a regular dude.

If he actually liked matcha, he might even border on a “performative male,” but any sort of caffeinated beverage makes him shaky. Plus, he’d never feign authenticity in any capacity; it’s a defining pillar of his artistic world.

All that’s to say that Liim’s life hasn’t changed much in the past two years. Despite releasing his acclaimed debut, landing a coveted Tyler, The Creator co-sign (on one of his early breakout tracks, “Petty Pete,” in particular), and carefully expanding the raw sonic world he introduced with “Petty Pete” and other early YouTube singles — “Edward 40 Handz,” “Memorize,” and “how to bake a pie” — he’s still spending his days as he usually does.

“I still do the same shit,” he tells me, though he’s swapped skateboarding for biking.

“And I don’t fight people anymore. I’m too old for that now,” he laughs. “I don’t know why we did all that. I’m mad chill now. I’m either making music or I’m at the cold plunge at SAA.”

Born and bred in Harlem, Liim says he’s from “all over New York,” living 19 years in the Morningside Heights before spending time in Coney Island, the Bronx, the Lower East Side, and now Bushwick. He started making music when he was 16, rapping over YouTube beats with his close friend and collaborator Opraah, and at 21 released his debut studio project, Liim Lasalle Loves You — a captivating, and deeply true-to-self, genre-traversing LP that leans indie almost as much as it leans hip-hop. “I’m grateful that people don’t treat me like I’m young, because I’m a baby still when it comes to music,” he says. “I don’t have any negative emotion towards it. I’m young. In a few years, I’m not gonna be young.”

Raised in a Muslim household by a Moroccan mother and Black father, Liim didn’t grow up listening to music at home; rather, it was when he stepped outside his front door that he was introduced — inundated, even — with an influx of global sounds. “I felt even more drawn to music because I wasn’t exposed to it in my home,” he adds. Since he was a teenager, he’s spent a lot of time outside.

He met Opraah skateboarding in the Lower East Side. He first linked up with Laila! through mutual friends. He connected with Adam Zhu of Market Gallery downtown when he was 18 and got kicked out of his house. It was Zhu who got him in the cut modeling for Supreme (and rapping about the free Supreme he’d get). Market Gallery was one of the first locations Liim suggested for our shoot.

It’s these hours rolling around the city that Liim believes shaped his creative lens from a young age. “Being outside so much is what gave me so much perspective,” he explains, equipped with a vision and focus most artists don’t land on until much later. “It allowed me to have this kind of introspectivity where I’m both experiencing and witnessing at the same time.” He’s also built an unwavering connection to his local communities throughout New York City. It’s those communities — especially in his Harlem hometown — that he feels he owes everything to.

“Growing up in Harlem makes me one of the most blessed people on Earth,” he says. “I was able to go through so much at such a young age — shit that strengthened me, shit that killed me, all types of shit. It helped me develop something a lot of people at my age just don’t have.” Rooted in his hometown heritage and artistically attuned beyond his years, it’s clear why people don’t treat Liim like he’s 22.

Every track he writes stems from personal experience or inspiration. “Even if people don’t know what you’re talking about, if you talk about your own life, the energy of what you’re saying is going to shine through, and people will relate.” He wrote “Mezcal,” for example, after trying a mezcal mule for the first time at a Clairo concert with Sham Scott — the producer on all of Liim LaSalle Loves You. In fact, it’s one of the few songs he actually sat down and wrote; most of the album was lifted directly from regular, lived experience. “I’m very inspired by what I’m doing, how I’m living, and what’s going on for me personally,” he says, gathering ample artistic influence on his bike rides across the city.

The self-proclaimed “lover boy” recorded Liim Lasalle Loves You while going through a long-term breakup. “I end up in a lot of situations that inspire me, and I try not to let it fuel my music too much, but it just does. I felt like my world was crumbling,” he shares. Compartmentalizing wasn’t the plan; channeling that crumble into his music was. With a stream-of-consciousness sentiment stringing each track together, it’s impossible to finish the project without learning at least one thing about who Liim is as a person — which is, naturally, the same persona he embodies as an artist.

“Clutching My Brakes” hears him reflect on growing up through the lens of biking, while on “Le Pouvoir Noir” (which was supposed to feature Lola Young before a technical mishap deleted her entire verse) we learn he speaks pretty solid French. “For The Both Of Us” revels in the clarity that comes post-breakup.

“That album was mostly all off the dome,” he admits, as if it’s second nature to him. “But I do want to get back into writing and strengthen my pen again. It’s a lost art.” There wasn’t a single throwaway track, he says; everything he wrote was meant to land on the final tracklist, and everything he didn’t write — well, it wasn’t time for those tracks yet.

I tell Liim that “For The Both Of Us” is my favorite from Liim Lasalle Loves You, and he says the same — especially because he finished it in just thirty minutes and the mid-way beat change was a total accident. Liim was freestyling over Sham’s beat, and mid-flow, the melody switched up. “The space in the beat is a complete accident, and it just worked perfectly. All the bars came straight to my head. I don’t think I’ve ever made a song quicker.”

Sham actually steps into the studio about halfway through one of our conversations, and the creative synergy between the two is almost instantly palpable — though it’s rare they’re ever in the same room when working. Liim prefers to ride solo, saying he’s at his creative prime when recording alone. He recorded almost all of Liim Lasalle Loves You in his Brooklyn studio. Writer’s block doesn’t really plague him these days; he’s nailed down his trigger point — “being overly unhealthy” — which is why maintaining his wellness routine is crucial. He’s far from a perfectionist, though. “If I get a song to a point where I can listen to it, then I like it, and it’s done.”

He and Sham have their collaborative system down to a science, optimized to only push out music that feels highly authentic to both parties. “Sham’s style really fits who I am as a person,” says Liim. “Since the beginning of time, Sham would just make a whole beat pack of 50,000 beats. His beats are kind of playful, kind of fly. Also, my prefrontal cortex is developing, so I have a better sense of what to say and what’s corny.”

Sham describes Lim as someone who unabashedly “wears his heart on his sleeve.” “All of his influences and everything he loves are at the forefront of his existence,” says Sham, “so it’s easy for me to think of him and create for him.”

Laila! FaceTimes Liim during our chat, so I asked her for a quote. “Stinky,” she answers. The two banter back and forth like they’ve known each other their whole lives before she continues, smirking, “He’s a good artist, I guess.” They both laugh.

“I don’t want to gas him up too hard, but he’s the future of music. He’s on that new shit that nobody’s on. … He’s more found than other lost n****s.” The duo share a genre-swerving lane of New York’s new pop-leaning, progressive hip-hop, both pioneers in pushing the emerging local sound beyond state lines. Liim then plays an unreleased track they recently wrote together — an epitome of their new-gen sonic symbiosis.

He plays me another unreleased song, one that naturally leads us into a conversation about genre. “Genre is something I’ve been struggling with lately,” he admits, calling this unreleased cut a “rock song.” But ultimately, to him, it’s all “just music.” As for his personal taste, he finds himself looking to the legends – Max B, Outkast, Dev Hynes, and, of course, Sham.

But what he hopes to inspire extends far beyond the music. “I want to inspire people from Harlem to step out of the box and be themselves in a different way,” he says when I ask about his purpose. “If you don’t dress the same as everyone else, look the same as everyone else, and talk the same, it’s hard for you to be yourself and stand out. Standing out was never an easy thing for a lot of people growing up.”

He’s put drill listeners onto Mk.gee and old Frank Ocean. “That’s the point. To further people’s taste.”

A few days before our first conversation, Liim performed at New York City’s newly reopened Cherry Lane Theater, the city’s oldest continuously running off-Broadway theater. The Commerce Street landmark reopened for a limited run this fall, with only a select few artists given the chance to headline the storied stage. For Liim to be one of them — in the company of Spike Lee, MIKE, and Tame Impala — is a true full-circle moment for the young musician: a high-brow cultural co-sign from the very city streets he wears on his sleeve.

“I just wing it,” he says of his live preparation, calling his Cherry Lane set particularly “improvised,” during which he brought out Opraah, AJ, Laila!, and Khalil. That unreleased “rock song” he played me earlier also happened to be the encore — just refreshed with new scratch vocals. His followers have been begging him to release it. He tells me he likely will.

Now, fresh off his European run, Liim can officially say he’s brought his music — and its intrinsically New York City ethos — far beyond the five boroughs, performing a handful of shows across London, Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris.

But his favorite show, to this day, is still his one in Brooklyn: his Liim Lasalle Loves You album preview performance at The Sultan Room. He and Sham agree it sums up his artistry to a tee. “A classic Liim show ends in everyone loitering outside the venue for like an hour,” Sham remarks, pointing to the mid-2025 Bushwick show as a prime example.

He says another Cherry Lane-esque, theatrical performance is in the near pipeline — with more preparation on his end — and he even has a specific skit in mind. “I wanna do this skit where I’m like, ‘How many of y’all have been slapped by Liim Lasalle?’ And it’s all the hands in the crowd going up.”

“Everything I’m doing and everything that’s coming to me is deserved because it’s not for me. It’s for a greater purpose.”