Priority Records

As raucous as he is energetic, Ndotspinalot echoes the relentless force of Bronx drill. Combining twitchy flows with gleeful warnings, the 15-year-old BX rapper sprints across frenetic drill beats for songs designed to eviscerate your speaker system. The Priority Records artist flaunts that electricity on “Nina,” an adrenaline rush coated in aggression and steel-plated machismo.

Skittering over pulsing drums, Ndot lets loose a barrage of bars his vocals careening off the beat like stray bullets: “Stop talking, let’s get to the basics / Shots at your head, then I take a vacation.” Raw and uninhibited, it’s a theme song for villainy—a soundtrack for trench dwellers who’ve learned the virtues of striking first. It’s also a reminder of why Ndot has become one of the most exciting voices BX drill has to offer. Now he has the chance to be like the artists he admired as a small child.

“When I was a little kid listening to people rap, I was looking up to them,” he says. “Now I know people feel that way about me.”

Raised in the Bronx’s River Park Towers, Ndot remembers being exposed to danger at an early age. “Elementary school was fun,” he says. “But when I hit middle school it was over.” Around this time, he’d been absorbing the sounds of Pop Smoke and Chicago drill artists like Lil Durk. With their combination of street raps and pummeling beats, it wasn’t hard to see why Ndot made a connection. “I could relate to them,” he says.

Soon, folks from the RPT community were gaining exposure for their own raps, with the BX becoming the latest branch in New York’s propulsive drill movement. While Ndot listened to the sounds, it was a while before he made any official recordings. But he began experimenting, recording his first song snippets with an iPhone at the age of 10. He’d post them to Instagram, where they would get 4,000 views. While his friends liked what they heard, Ndot still hadn’t been in an official studio.

In the spring of 2022, many of Ndot’s friends were arrested as part of an indictment, putting multiple aspiring rappers behind bars. “We would all be talking about rapping and getting signed and doing all that shit we wanna do,” he remembers. “When the indictment happened, we thought it was all over.” With his friends imprisoned, he began taking rap more seriously, and it wasn’t long before his new commitment paid off.

In that same time span, Ndot posted snippets of “Bestie,” a single laced with quick-fire flows and bursts of menace. Grafting his prepubescent vocals onto a quirky drill beat, Ndot showcased authentic street energy and a level of technical precision that belied his years. With clips of the song going viral on TikTok, and subsequent releases like “RPT” and “Pop Out” also gaining traction, it was clear that Ndot was in the midst of a major level-up. “When that first happened, I didn’t really believe it at all,” he says of the moment.

By the end of 2022, Ndot had crystallized his status as an artist to watch, riding agile flows and scabrous lyricism into the spotlight. With “Nina” and plenty of momentum at his back, he looks to make his come-up a memorable one. On a grander level, he plans to live out his dreams for his folks caught up in the system.

“I’m holding down the movement they started,” he says. “This is just the beginning.”