Zy Smoke is really doing this, and honestly it’s about time people outside the island started paying attention.

Zy Smoke is 22, from Mariners Harbor, and he’s been putting in work that most people his age haven’t even thought about yet. No label backing him. No radio plugs. Nothing handed to him. Just him, Giovanni Gambino in the studio, and music that people keep coming back to. We’re talking over 20,000 monthly listeners on Spotify right now, and his fans play his songs an average of six times a session. Six. You don’t do that with a song you kind of like. You do that with a song that says something you needed to hear.

June 3rd he drops “Night Shift Halo,” and the timing couldn’t be better. “Liquid Fire” came out May 1st and already crossed 2,000 streams in the first week. No promo budget doing that. Just a good song finding its people.

But you gotta know where Zy Smoke came from to really get why the music sounds the way it does. He was seven years old when a car hit him and took off. Didn’t stop. Left him on the pavement. “I remember the screeching tires, the impact, and lying on the cold pavement looking up at the sky,” he said. Before that Zy Smoke was a choirboy, on Sundays in church. After the accident life slowly pulled him somewhere else, and by fifteen he caught adult charges for shooting someone who disrespected his mother. That’s a road a lot of young men from around here don’t find their way back from.

But Zy Smoke found his way back.

Music was already in him from fourteen, but it didn’t click as something real until Gambino came into the picture. “He brought the light to me and really made me understand this is something that’s really for me,” Zy said. You can hear that in how he works. He starts from a feeling every time, sits with the beat, gets still, and whatever comes out first is what the song gets built around. No formula. Just honesty.

“Liquid Fire” was him saying out loud that the anger didn’t go away just because he survived. That it’s still in there and he’s figuring out how to hold it without letting it burn everything down. “Night Shift Halo” goes further. The light after the fire. “They’re two sides of the same journey,” Zy Smoke said. The night shift is those hours nobody sees, the grinding and struggling in the dark with no guarantee anything’s coming. The halo is God still being present through it anyway.

They shot the video in the rain at night out in New York, and there’s a moment where Jesus reaches for his hand right before he falls. Sounds like a lot on paper. On screen it lands completely because the song earned it.

The line that probably cost him the most to write is one of the quietest ones on the record. His mom calls, tells him she’s praying for him, and he just texts back hearts. Keeps it short. “That one hurt because it’s true,” Zy said. “I still struggle to let people love me while I’m healing.” That’s the kind of thing you don’t write unless you lived it.

Staten Island does something to you when you grow up here. It teaches you real fast that nobody’s coming to shine a light on you so you better figure out how to make your own. “We’re part of New York City but always overlooked,” he said. “It taught me you have to create your own light when the world doesn’t give it to you.” That energy is in everything he puts out.

Zy Smoke wants 100,000 monthly listeners in the next twelve months. Looking at where he started and where he’s sitting right now, that’s not a dream.

“Night Shift Halo” is out June 3rd. Play it for someone who needs it – Pre-Save