He admits it wasn’t easy. “People were always throwing all of these identity politics on everything that I did. Mykki Blanco: gay rapper; Mykki Blanco: queer rapper, artist, activist, writer. It could never just be: musician Mykki Blanco.

“I suppose the 2010s was an era of reckoning for a lot of things. But overall, I just found it to be really, really dismissive. It literally took eight years of me releasing music for people to, like, not do that anymore. And with the kind of music that I make now, I don’t really even rap,” he says laughing. “And that was also intentional. The music that I’m making right now feels way more open and way less restrictive than just rapping.” He describes hip-hop, in general, as a young person’s game. “Maybe at best you’re going to get two or three raps out of me per album. I just feel way too much freedom using my voice in different ways.”

The musical possibilities, at this stage in his career, feel infinite.

“When you’ve been making music for a long time and you can succeed at a sound that you never thought you’d be capable of making, the level of confidence that comes, it just feels like things break open,” he says. “With , there was this feeling of, I wanted to be more out of body.” Transcending boundaries, transcending skin. “When we were in the studio, when the songs were in the skeleton stage, I’d already be imagining what I’d do onstage.” 

It was an exhausting, but fulfilling process. He always commits to expanding his sound and pushing himself. Taking it easy, musically, is a recipe for disaster, he believes. “If you rest on your laurels, you can definitely get worse.”

As his sound expands, his musical persona and his own identity continue to merge and stand in tandem to each other.

“I would say that it’s pretty cohesive now,” he says of the relationship between  and  the musician. “Becasue I’ve been Mykki Blanco for so long. I mean, this career, the experiences that I’ve had…” He shrugs, as if it’s simple. “I am Mykki.”