By the time the initial COVID lockdowns lifted, though, things had changed. For one, the industry writ large returned to an in-person session model; for another, Kaytranada had hit a new stratum of fame and was finding himself in studios with artists whose work he grew up studying. The move to LA in 2021 made some of the logistics easier, but it also took him far out of his comfort zone. When he recounts these stories, you can see his shoulders tense, the stress of interference still weighing on him.

And then, during a session with the Angeleno soul singer Georgia Anne Muldrow, an epiphany. “We were just vibing, going through these beats,” Kaytranada explains. “I was very shy to make beats in person, too shy to express myself. I was used to people doing their own thing.” Muldrow clocked this, and wasn’t having it. “She was like, ‘Come on, Mr. Producer, whatcha gonna do, Mr. Producer? Whatcha gonna do?’ And then that fucked me up in a way! It was like, damn, this shit is serious. I had to be more serious than that.” 

“I’m very shy, too,” Muldrow says. “It’s the shy ones who get a chance to know their surroundings more and understand the human condition; we take the extra time to take it all in before engaging. That’s gold in translation for being a producer. And so seeing that type of quality in Kaytranada, I just loved to encourage him. It’s the very same shyness that is the source of his versatility in style and groove. 

“Really, he’s a sponge. That’s the only reason I kept” prodding him, she adds. “I wanted him to assert what he observed in real time, and make it fun.”

The encouragement set Kaytranada off in the right direction. But it’s one thing to literally make beats in front of an audience. It’s another still to assert your style and sensibility. “It’s definitely something you become obsessed with,” he says, “the sense that they’re never going to get it.” He describes the pressure he felt, early in his career, to “turn the swing down sometimes” — to make beats more pop than R&B if he imagined that’s what an artist wanted, a deflating process made all the more frustrating by being self-enforced. This only abated when he realized there would be no pleasing everyone, no matter how far out of his preferred pocket he went. 

“Of course some people are not going to get it,” he says of his current mind state. “But it’s still what I want to express. It’s still coming from the heart. It’s still 100 percent me.”

This reserved streak is noted even by rap’s most elusive living artist. “When I met him, it seemed to me that he was a man of few words,” says Mach-Hommy, the acclaimed rapper whose face is always masked and whose name has never been revealed. “After a few months of working remotely on a little house music album, K slowly began to communicate in more and more detail. He eventually shared his origin story with me, what it was like growing up in Quebec... He told me how electronic music was never his real aim, and how his real passion lay in the creation of dark and moody sample-driven hip-hop. Montreal shit, as he so succinctly put it. I think he described his success in the electronic music scene as a ‘happy accident.’”

The pair’s first collaboration, a single from Kaytranada’s 2021 EP, Intimidated, was a nod to their shared heritage. “$payforhaiti,” part of the proceeds of which benefitted Mach’s Pray for Haiti Trust Fund, is a bright, skittering cut delivered partially in Creole; “#RICHAXXHAITIAN,” from Mach’s album of the same name, feels even closer to how that nascent house LP might sound. “Two Haitians in a post-apocalyptic Tinsel Town,” Mach says of their chemistry. “What could go wrong?”

When Kaytranada was a teenager, he paid close attention to the battle between Lupe Fiasco and Atlantic Records over what would become the Chicago rapper’s third album, Lasers. It was a catalyzing event for Kaytranada, who decided to make whatever contractual concessions were necessary to retain creative control over his career. It’s something he’s demanded in all his recording contracts — and extends to his attitude about sampling. “A lot of people are skipping sampling; they just don’t want to go through the bullshit and the lawsuits, or even [calling rights holders],” he says. “But I’m a hip-hop head. I’m a purist when it comes to that.”

And yet any career that includes a string of arena dates across Europe, as Kaytranada’s will this summer, suggests an enterprise so big it would be difficult for one person to steer. There are trucks to take monitors and pieces of a stage from Berlin to Warsaw (and to Zurich, then Munich…) and an unending string of interchangeable hotel rooms where Kaytranada will take his production equipment but, he anticipates, rarely touch it. When he tours, he says, “all my creativity is just poured into when I perform.” There will be tens of thousands of fans dancing every night, tracking the minute changes he likes to make to the studio versions of his songs. He says the sheer scale will never stop being a little surreal. 

Still, Kaytranada knows that sometimes the best thing you can do is wait. So for now, he’s biding his time, working on beats from the couch — some presumably the krump mutations he teased — while movies play quietly in the background. 

He works most nights between 10 p.m. and 3 a.m. Otherwise, he’s rediscovering things that never got their moment. “I was always a fan of Raphael Saadiq,” he says, “but I never really listened to his second record,” 2004’s G funk-inflected Ray Ray. “Now, it’s one of my favorite albums.” Back then, he shrugs, it just wasn’t the time. And so until the perfect moment, Kaytranada will be here: tinkering, listening, conjuring something unlike anything that came before.