Vancouver’s bbno$, born Alexander Gumuchian and pronounced baby no money, was supposed to be a one song story. Lalala took its viral lap in 2019, and instead of fading with the meme cycle, he kept releasing albums on his own terms: nine studio albums deep and still independent.
We told the Lalala story in full in our Revisited piece on the song, from the Y2K production to the remix that pulled in Carly Rae Jepsen and Enrique Iglesias. This piece is about everything after: the catalogue that turned a viral moment into a career.
Edamame, The Second Lightning Strike
Every viral artist gets one question: do it again. Edamame, released on July 23, 2021 with Rich Brian, is bbno$ doing it again on purpose. Diamond Pistols produced it, the video dropped the same day with both artists clanking around a Los Angeles mansion in medieval armour, and the song went on to be used in more than ten million TikTok videos. It was nominated for Rap Single of the Year at the 2022 Juno Awards and certified multi-platinum, and it anchored Eat Ya Veggies, his sixth studio album, released on October 8, 2021.
The collaboration carried its own full-circle charge. In the single’s press release, bbno$ said:
“I started making music right after Rich Brian popped off and I was obsessed with ‘Glow Like Dat’. My 19-year-old self is still fan boying over ‘Edamame’.”
That is the independent era in miniature: a fan makes a record with the artist who inspired him to start, releases it himself, and watches it outrun most major label singles of the same summer.
It is worth remembering what Lalala actually did, because the second act only makes sense against it. The song passed 500 million streams, went platinum, and picked up a remix featuring Carly Rae Jepsen and Enrique Iglesias, two pop stars from entirely different lanes arriving at the same Vancouver record. Most artists who catch a wave like that spend the next five years trying to recreate it. bbno$ spent them building the catalogue underneath it, starting with the albums that were already there: BB Steps in 2018 and Recess in 2019, the pre-viral foundation the meme audience never went back for.
The Baby Gravy Parallel Catalogue
Running beside the solo albums is a second catalogue built with Yung Gravy, the Baby Gravy series. The pair’s Baby Gravy 2, released on Valentine’s Day 2020, was his first entry on the Billboard 200, and Baby Gravy 3 followed in 2023. Between those bookends, the solo run kept its own pace: i don’t care at all closed the Lalala year in 2019, Good Luck Have Fun arrived in October 2020, and Bag or Die landed in 2022 behind the single Mathematics.
The hinge between the two catalogues is shining on my ex, a bbno$ and Yung Gravy collaboration that first appeared on i don’t care at all and then took its place on Baby Gravy 2, the sound of the solo pen and the duo act feeding each other in both directions.
The volume is the strategy. Where a viral artist is supposed to protect the one hit, bbno$ treated virality as distribution and flooded his own channel: collaborations, costumes, singles stacked on singles, and headline tours that sold out across North America, China and Europe while the industry was still deciding whether he was a joke it had missed. The humour is real, but it is packaging. Underneath it sits one of the most disciplined release schedules in Canadian music.
A Self-Titled Album, A Career Peak
The recent run sharpened the point. It Boy led the charge in 2024, and 1-800, his June 2025 collaboration with the VTuber Ironmouse, became one of the biggest independent songs of its year. Then, on October 17, 2025, he released his ninth studio album, titled simply bbno$, and it reached number 33 on the Canadian Albums chart and number 140 on the Billboard 200, the highest American placement of his career. We marked its first anniversary in our coverage of the self-titled album.
The live show has scaled with the catalogue: the world tour behind the self-titled album lined up more than 65 dates, including London’s O2 Academy Brixton and Toronto’s Budweiser Stage, rooms that viral singles alone do not fill.
That is the full arc: a Vancouver kid with a joke name and the patience to outwork the meme cycle turned one viral single into a nine album catalogue, a parallel duo franchise, global tours and a career peak arriving six years after the moment that was supposed to expire. Lalala opened the door. The catalogue is what walked through it.
