Everywhere I've gone in the United States this year, I've heard Future's music. From New York to Austin to Chicago to Portland, it's been coming out of club speakers, car windows, teens' mouths and phones. At this point, he's a veteran, having been a major presence in Atlanta's ever-vibrant hip hop scene since 2010, but it wasn't until 2015 that he became omnipresent. In less than a year, he released three mixtapes and an album, and took the world by storm. Here's how he did it.

He Nixed His Pop Aspirations

"Tried to make me a pop star and they made a monster," goes an "I Serve The Base" line that doubles as DS2's mission statement. Future's referring to his career's transformation after signing to a major label, which entailed singing ballads, writing hits for others and pursuing collaborations that seemed more based on mass appeal than artistic chemistry. To the casual observer, these big moves yielded some great music, but around the time of this breakup with Ciara, it became clear that he was uncomfortable with this high-profile, commercially-minded career. “I wanna marry you but I can’t have no big wedding on E! News,” he recalled saying to her in a documentary earlier this year.

What followed were three mixtapes (Monster, Beast Mode and 56 Nights) that, as free releases, allowed Future to speak from the heart and have full control over the selection of beats and collaborators. Earlier this year, 56 Nights architect Southside remembered telling the rapper, "Yo, you’re talented. You can write for whoever or whatever, but you gotta think how you came out, my man. You came out ‘Same Damn Time,’ ‘Tony Montana,’ it’s time to get back to that." Like those early singles, the music of those tapes is more minimal and focused on hustling rather than romance, and although it didn't initially make an impact on the radio, it whipped Future's increasingly rabid fanbase into a frenzy that grew with each subsequent release. By revisiting the sound that made him a star in the first place, Future appeased his day-one fans while bringing the listeners he had acquired with his hits along for the ride.

He Found Inspiration in Post-Breakup Depression

Sadness, depression and turmoil often yields artists' best work—this goes back as far as Frank Sinatra's In The Wee Small Hours and Miles Davis' Kind Of Blue. But as Sharon Steel explained a few years ago in a great piece on Death Cab For Cutie's Ben Gibbard, equating songwriters' happiness with subpar output, and vice versa, is a problematic position as a listener. Truth be told, Honest, much of it written around the time Future and Ciara got engaged, had some excellent, heartfelt love songs that showed us the side of Future we rarely got on his early mixtapes. There was also some evidence of a personality crisis though, like the placement of ballad "I'll Be Yours" right next to "How Can I Not," which includes lines about "smashing your hoe."

The position of starry-eyed lover was one that Future was perfectly capable of occupying for a song or two, but not one that he could sustain over a full project. As it turns out, his day-one persona of an unrepentant trapper getting high on his own supply is much more compatible with heartbreak than you'd expect. In the post-breakup vantage point he's been speaking from since Monster, Future's been able to be more honest while not sacrificing any of the emotional heft he mined on Honest, which has led to gems like "Codeine Crazy," an absolutely devastating exploration of his cough syrup addiction. As someone who grew up with the odds stacked against him, Future's best source of inspiration has always been fighting himself out of a corner. 

He Shrunk His Circle of Collaborators

Honest had all of the "oh shit" collaborations: The Kanyes, Wiz Khalifas, Pharrells and Lil Waynes, not to mention the most recent verse the world has heard from Andre 3000. These ranged from underwhelming (like the song that lovingly referred to Kim Kardashian and Ciara as trophy wives) to explosive (the 3000-assisted "Benz Friendz," in particular), but their eclectic nature added to the jumbled feel of the emotionally fractured album. Future clearly wasn't feeling this seemingly label-advised heaping of guests, because combined, his next three tapes and album featured as many guest vocalists as Honest's first four tracks. The lack of featured rappers allowed his magnetic personality to paint a more fully-formed portrait of his life, and the tightened roster of producers led to full-lengths with more cohesive vibes.

The World Finally Came Around to His Barely Intelligible Style

Confession time: In Fall 2011, I was tasked with transcribing an interview with Future for an internship. It (and the subsequent article) focused on his deeply rooted ties with The Dungeon Family, an Atlanta-based collective that included OutKast, who are still my all-time favorite rap group. Throughout the conversation, I found myself bristling every time Future or the interviewer made comparisons to or invoked the name of ‘Kast, simply because I did not see any connecting thread between, say, “Ms. Jackson” and “Tony Montana,” Future’s big single at the time. On one hand you had Big Boi and Andre 3000’s dazzling wordplay and complex themes, on the other, I thought, was just unintelligible shout-rap delivered in a faux-Cuban accent. 

Two years later, Future released a single called “Honest” and I finally got it. Like “Tony Montana” before it, the song was repetitive and took a few listens to parse out the lyrics, but in retrospect, I don’t necessarily think it’s better than its predecessor— I had just come around to a different style of hip hop. The still-trendy cocktail of autotune, mumbling, hyperkinetic trap beats and synth sheen is an acquired taste, particularly for snobs (like me) who came up listening to hip hop that was the polar opposite: wordy, complex and driven by dusty samples of often-familiar oldies.

Even for someone who keeps up with new music as obsessively as I do, it took a while for me to acclimate to this new wave (read more about that here), and the same was true for mainstream rap radio. Enunciation-optional rap songs didn’t start doing damage on the charts until Rich Gang’s “Lifestyle” hit number 16 last year, and it wasn’t until July 2015 that Future broke into the top 30. Outside of regional pockets of superfans, Future and his Atlantan contemporaries struggled to find national success until very recently, and so his success is in some part due to larger trends in rap fans’ listening habits.  

#Futurehive Took Off

If we've learned one thing from the last five years of online music, it's that you can't underestimate memes. They're no small part of Drake's continued dominance (the extremely GIF-able "Hotline Bling" video being the most recent example), and this summer, Future got an extra boost from some particularly enthusiastic fans. Riffing on Beyoncé's "BeyHive" fanbase, the #FutureHive took Twitter by storm by pairing the rapper's lyrics with photoshops of his face on iconic pictures, later expanding to Vine and even Anonymous-style online justice. Confused onlookers (especially Bey fans) may question the importance of the Hive, and some day-one Future supporters may have gotten a little irked by bandwagoners, but it plastered him across everyone's feeds, thrusting a formerly niche-interest artist into the public consciousness. Future's music is definitely more to blame for increased sales and critical praise, but as far as making him a "big deal" online, you've got to give it up for his Hive.