NAV turns 37 today, November 3, born Navraj Singh Goraya in Toronto in 1989 and raised in Rexdale, in the city’s northwest. He marks the birthday weeks after Music Canada certified his Perfect Timing mixtape platinum, the latest plaque in a career that carried a Rexdale producer’s sound to the top of the Billboard 200 twice.
This is a career retrospective, and the timing earns it. Birthdays are usually soft news, but NAV’s 37th arrives at the end of the strongest certification month of his life in his home country, with a JUNO nomination already on his 2026 record and a run of new collaborations with Young Thug and Quavo behind him. For toronto rappers, the list of artists who turned a neighbourhood sound into a decade of chart results is short. NAV is on it, and the receipts from October prove the catalogue is still appreciating.
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Toronto Rappers: NAV Built From Rexdale Out
NAV started as a producer before he was a recording artist, and the first break came from outside music’s usual machinery: a Snapchat clip of Kylie Jenner singing along to his song Myself carried the Rexdale artist’s voice further in days than years of local grinding had. In 2016 he became the first official signee to The Weeknd’s XO label, a Toronto-to-Toronto signing that put the city’s two waves in one building. His self-titled mixtape arrived in early 2017, and that July he teamed with Atlanta producer Metro Boomin for Perfect Timing, which reached number seven on the Canadian Albums Chart and number thirteen on the Billboard 200.
The producer’s ear never left the records. NAV rides hypnotic trap production with a sing-rap flow that producers recognize as engineered rather than improvised, and it made him a bridge figure: a Toronto artist whose sound Atlanta stars could step into without adjusting. That quality runs from the Metro Boomin tapes through to his 2026 collaborations, Trimski and Whoa with Young Thug and Mutt with Quavo, and it is why his features and his own albums kept arriving on schedule for nine years.
The Chart Run, Album By Album
The studio run is the spine of the retrospective. Reckless, his debut album, arrived May 18, 2018 and reached number eight on the Billboard 200. Bad Habits followed in 2019 and debuted at number one on both the Billboard 200 and the Canadian Albums Chart. Good Intentions repeated the double in 2020, topping both charts again. Demons Protected by Angels, released September 9, 2022, debuted at number two on the Billboard 200 and at number one on Billboard’s R and B/Hip-Hop and Rap album charts. His fifth album, OMW2 Rexdale, arrived March 28, 2025, a fourteen-track record named for the neighbourhood that raised him, with a deluxe edition adding eight more tracks.
Read in sequence, those numbers describe something rarer than a hot streak. NAV placed albums at the top of the American chart in two different decades of his own career, kept a Canadian number one in the same years, and then made his most explicitly Toronto record, the Rexdale album, as his fifth. The 2023 single Calling, with Metro Boomin, Swae Lee and A Boogie wit da Hoodie from the Spider-Verse soundtrack, showed the same reach in soundtrack form, and the video above is that record’s official visual.
A Platinum Month Before The Birthday
October 2026 rewrote his Canadian plaque wall. In Music Canada certifications dated October 6, 2026, Perfect Timing, the 2017 mixtape with Metro Boomin, was certified a platinum album in Canada. Its single Call Me, released July 14, 2017 and given a video directed by RJ Sanchez that August, was certified double platinum. Two more songs from the same project, Minute and Hit, were certified platinum singles. Four certifications for one nine-year-old mixtape, all dated the same week, is the market restating what the project meant and what it still earns.
The current year has kept pace. NAV is a 2026 JUNO nominee for Rap Single of the Year with Unlimited, featuring Playboi Carti. His 2026 collaborations with Young Thug, Trimski and Whoa, reconnected him with one of the first major artists to cosign him in the Perfect Timing era, and Mutt added Quavo to the list. At 37, the story is not a comeback and it is not a farewell. It is a catalogue compounding in public, with the home country’s industry stamping the paperwork a month before the birthday. Rexdale sent a producer out with a laptop sound and a neighbourhood name he refused to drop. The plaques keep arriving addressed to the same place.
