Toronto rapper twentythree released the single Turn Up with an official video in late October, extending a run of singles after debut project 6ix Pop. The twentythree Turn Up video pairs the bass heavy track with visuals for a song that pushes his rap and digicore mix to a faster tempo, and it lands while his monthly audience sits above 2.5 million listeners on Spotify.
A single built for the dancefloor
Turn Up is the latest step in a deliberate tempo shift. Where much of twentythree’s early catalogue moved at the pace of post-SoundCloud rap, the new single leans into the energy of the electronic music he has spent three summers studying in Toronto clubs. The production is bass forward and built to move, and the video gives that shift a visual home, extending a run that has made visuals part of the release itself rather than an afterthought. His breakthrough song Queen St arrived with a self-edited video, and the pattern holds here.
Join The iimiTV Letter
Enter your email and we will send you a confirmation link. Click it and your first edition lands on Friday.
The single also carries the momentum of a crowded year. Turn Up follows Crack, released earlier in October, the Jaeychino collaboration Jersey Shore in September, and Biggest Fan in August. Four singles in three months is a working pace, and each one has tested a slightly different corner of his sound, from digicore textures to straight rap records, while the audience kept growing.
The 6ix Pop foundation
The run rests on 6ix Pop, the debut project twentythree released on June 26 through his own Greezy Gang imprint. The nine track tape, with songs including Queen St, Too Greezy, IG MODEL and COUPLE MS, was billed as a reflection on Toronto’s specific atmosphere through the lens of post-SoundCloud jerk, and it played like a map of the city from penthouse highs to street level detail. Toronto rappers have long named the city in their work, but 6ix Pop made the city’s sound itself the subject.
The project changed his scale. It pushed him past 2.5 million monthly Spotify listeners and carried him to a sold out headlining show at Toronto’s Mod Club, the legendary College Street room that has hosted generations of the city’s rising acts. For an independent artist releasing through his own imprint, a sold out Mod Club headline is a concrete marker, the kind of hometown proof that turns online numbers into a live draw.
Queen St and the cosign economy
Queen St is still the engine. The sleeper hit has now passed 70 million streams across platforms, a remarkable climb for a song that grew from a self-edited video into a fixture of the city’s new wave. Streaming counts told only part of the story, though. twentythree counts Drake among his Instagram followers, a cosign from the biggest artist the city has produced, and the UK rapper fakemink brought him out at a Toronto show earlier this year to perform Queen St in front of a hometown crowd.
Those moments matter in Canadian hip hop because they are how a scene certifies its next names. A Drake follow and a live bring-out are not marketing spends, they are peer signals, and they arrived while the singles run was still accelerating. Among Toronto rappers building from the underground up in 2026, few have stacked peer signals and streaming growth at the same time.
Three summers ago, I started going to all types of raves: electronic, electronic pop, techno, hard techno, drum and bass, everything. I really started going because I wanted to expand my sound beyond something that I have created so far. Experiencing that and seeing what people dance to, what people react to, and what makes them move helped a lot with the production.
That explanation, given to Pitchfork earlier this year, is the clearest account of where Turn Up comes from. The song’s tempo is not a trend chase, it is fieldwork, three summers of watching Toronto dancefloors and rebuilding his production around what actually moves them.
From Tehran production lessons to Toronto
The backstory explains the range. Born in Iran, twentythree started making music as a kid, teaching himself production through VPNs, and moved to Canada at 15 to live with extended family. During the pandemic he connected online with the D.C. area producer SJR over a John Carpenter style sample pack he had posted, and SJR recruited him to produce for the rap collective Too Many Strikers. Production credits for artists including Destroy Lonely, OsamaSon and Babyface Ray followed before his own solo run stepped forward in 2024 with singles like LOVE LIFE, Gotta Be Patient and 2 PILLS.
Even his name is personal. He chose twentythree as a reference to his birthday, February 23, and built the Greezy Gang collective around the identity, first as a producer’s credit and now as the imprint releasing his own catalogue.
What comes next
The next marker is already named. In his Pitchfork conversation, twentythree teased a debut album, Greezy God, as the step beyond the 6ix Pop tape and the loosies run. Turn Up sounds like a bridge record for exactly that move, a single that keeps the rap foundation while importing the tempos of the rooms he has been studying. If the album lands with this momentum behind it, the Mod Club will not be the biggest Toronto room he headlines for long.
