Born Navraj Goraya and raised in Rexdale, NAV turned SoundCloud uploads into an XO deal and two number one albums in the United States. Plenty of Toronto rappers announce themselves loudly. He did the opposite, and the charts came to him.
Rexdale First, Then The Timeline Lit Up
NAV started uploading in 2015, producing his own records and letting the internet do the introductions. Take Me Simple was an early calling card. Myself travelled further, helped along when Kylie Jenner posted herself singing it on Snapchat, the kind of accident no marketing budget buys. In January 2016, Drake played Take Me Simple on OVO Sound Radio, and later that year NAV’s voice turned up on Travis Scott’s beibs in the trap, on one of the biggest rap albums of the season. All of it happened before he had a record deal, a retail single, or a public face to put with the voice.
The run matters because of where it started. Rexdale, in Toronto’s northwest end, is not a neighbourhood the industry scouts. NAV’s early catalogue is producer music first: he built the beats, tuned his own vocals, and let the records accumulate until the labels had no choice but to come to Etobicoke.
Some Way Opens The XO Door
The Weeknd’s XO label signed NAV a week before his self-titled mixtape landed in February 2017, and Some Way was the handshake the public heard. Released on February 15, 2017 as the mixtape’s lead single, written and produced by NAV himself, it carries The Weeknd, the only guest on the whole tape. The video, directed by RJ Sanchez and released on March 3, 2017, is a photo shoot daydream that has passed 78 million views. The record peaked at number 31 on the Canadian Hot 100, and it has been certified four times platinum in Canada and double platinum in the United States.
The mixtape itself peaked at number 24 on the Billboard 200, a serious debut for a Rexdale producer with no radio record. Perfect Timing, his full-length collaboration with Metro Boomin, followed that summer, and the one-two of the tape and the collab project established the NAV formula: hypnotic self-produced loops, a voice processed into velvet, and features chosen like endorsements.
NAV Good Intentions And The Back To Back Number Ones
Reckless, his studio debut, peaked at number eight in 2018. Then the ceiling broke. Bad Habits gave NAV his first Billboard 200 number one in the spring of 2019, opening with 82,000 units. Good Intentions, released on May 8, 2020 through XO and Republic, did it again: number one with 135,000 first-week units, 73,000 of them pure album sales, with a deluxe edition, Brown Boy 2, arriving three days later. The guest list ran from a posthumous Pop Smoke verse to Travis Scott, Future, Young Thug, Gunna, Lil Uzi Vert and Don Toliver. NAV described the headspace to Complex:
“I feel like I’m in the same creative headspace and work ethic as Bad Habits. Then when it came to the content on the album, I’ve been more reflective, more honest.”
The years since have kept the chart line moving: Emergency Tsunami reached number six in November 2020, Demons Protected by Angels debuted at number two in 2022, and in 2025 he released OMW2 Rexdale, a title that puts the neighbourhood in the album name outright, a decade after the uploads started there.
The feature run around the albums tells the same story from the other side. In August 2020, three months after Good Intentions topped the chart, NAV appeared on Internet Money’s Lemonade alongside Gunna and Don Toliver, a record that became one of the defining streaming hits of that year. The kid who produced his own way out of Rexdale had become the voice other producers called when a record needed to travel.
The Rexdale Name, Carried All The Way
There is a line in Some Way where NAV calls himself the first brown boy to get it poppin, and the catalogue since has treated that line like a thesis. A Punjabi-Canadian producer from Rexdale became a fixture of the XO era, produced most of his own catalogue, and put two albums on top of the American chart without ever sanding down the story of where he is from. That is the run: Rexdale to XO, with the receipts in the chart books.
